Bodies. Stories. Languages. Images. Rituals. Technologies. Institutions. Ways of loving. Ways of grieving. Ways of imagining ourselves and one another.
Shaping Inheritance brings together all eight Charles Gaines Fellows across four fellowship cohorts for the first time, exploring how contemporary artists inherit—and transform—the systems that shape our lives. Across painting, sculpture, installation, film, sound, performance, collage, and expanded media, the exhibition asks not simply what we inherit, but what we choose to make from inheritance.
Each artist approaches a different inherited system:
• Jo Xacto transforms projection into a practice of self-composition, using collage, performance, and contradiction to question how identity is imagined before it is lived.
• Kiko Thomas works through the material afterlives of infrastructure, examining bureaucracy, public assistance, surveillance, and environmental collapse to recover dignity from systems that promised care.
• Angie Emily Joseph considers kinship as both inheritance and responsibility, exploring how we become ourselves without severing the relationships that first shaped us.
• Niema Lightseed understands ecology as a living system of reciprocity, asking how repair emerges through embodiment, reverence, and interdependence.
• alex Escobedo approaches ordinary objects with curiosity and play, treating accumulation and unfinishedness as ways of navigating uncertainty.
• Erick Benitez explores translation across images, technologies, myths, and language, revealing identity as something continually transformed through relation.
• AK Jenkins examines systems of measurement and classification, questioning how institutions make bodies visible, legible, and governable.
• jeffrey martín investigates image systems through film, installation, and performance, exploring how repetition, citation, humor, and excess allow inherited representations to be interrupted and recomposed.
Together, these practices propose that inheritance is never fixed—it is something we continually compose.
Presented in partnership with @calarts, @calarts.alumni, @calarts.artschool, and @calarts.reefresidency, curated by jeffrey martin
