Spoleto Festival USA unveils official 2017 poster
April 6, 2017
Spoleto Festival USA General Director Nigel Redden unveiled the 2017 poster design featuring the work of Charles Gaines, an early pioneer of conceptual art. The piece, entitled Numbers and Trees IV, Tree 3, Spike (38 ⅝” x 46 ⅝”, acrylic sheet, acrylic paint, Masonite) was originally created in 1988 and is part of Gaines’s notable Numbers and Trees series. The Festival’s 2017 poster is available for purchase for $35 from the Festival’s box office at the Charleston Gaillard Center (beginning May 1), online at spoletousa.org, or by calling 843.579.3100.
Born in Charleston in 1944, Charles Gaines moved to the Northeast at a young age and graduated from Jersey City State University before earning a master of fine arts degree from Rochester Institute of Technology in New York in 1967. In the early 1970s, Gaines began exploring conceptual art, using a system of grids to frame his works. His expansive and ongoing Numbers and Trees series (which he began in 1986), for example, incorporates large black-and-white photographs of leafless trees overlaid with a gridded acrylic sheet. Colorful trees painted on acrylic sheets are then also added; each square of painted tree contains a tiny, hand-painted number determined by its location on the grid.
A longtime arts educator beginning at historically black university Mississippi Valley State in 1967, Gaines accepted a professorial position in 1989 at California Institute of the Arts and has remained on the school’s faculty since then. In recent years, Gaines has explored multimedia work such as Manifestos 2 (2013), transforming major historical speeches into musical scores by assigning a note to each written letter.
Since 1977, Spoleto Festival USA’s posters have featured work by influential artists such as Jonathan Green, Chuck Close, Jasper Johns, Sol LeWitt, Henry Moore, Elizabeth Murray, Bridget Riley, and Alex Katz, among others. A gallery of past posters available for sale can be found online at spoletousa.org. Spoleto Festival USA posters are limited editions and are not re-printed once they have sold out.
