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California Institute of the Arts

SHAPING INHERITANCE: Inheritance, Curating, and What Gets Carried Forward

CalArts at the Reef

Event Information

Date: Oct. 17

Location: The Reef; 1933 S Broadway, Los Angeles, CA 90007

Promotional poster for “Shaping Inheritance: Public Programming,” listing three sessions on Saturday, October 17, 2026, over a colorful geometric background.

If inheritance names the conditions into which we arrive, what does it mean to shape what comes next?

On the closing day of Shaping Inheritance, artists, curators, and the Charles Gaines MFA Fellows gather for an afternoon of conversations examining artistic inheritance not as a fixed lineage, but as an active process of interpretation, transformation, refusal, and transmission.

Shaping Inheritance is the first exhibition to bring together every Charles Gaines MFA Fellow at CalArts. Across eight distinct practices, the exhibition asks how artists encounter systems they did not create themselves—images, languages, institutions, technologies, histories, ecologies, objects, and forms of kinship—and how those inherited conditions might become material for something otherwise.

Rather than tracing a shared aesthetic lineage from Charles Gaines, the exhibition considers what happens when a concern with systems moves through different histories, materials, practices, and ways of living.

Across three conversations, the closing program moves from inheritance → curatorial interpretation → the Fellows → what gets carried forward.

Schedule

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17TH

1:00–1:45 PM - INHERITANCE

Charles Gaines + Cauleen Smith
Moderated by jeffrey martín

What do artists inherit beyond aesthetics?

Charles Gaines and Cauleen Smith begin the afternoon with a conversation about artistic practice, teaching, systems, institutions, Los Angeles, and the ideas and conditions that move between generations of artists.

The conversation considers inheritance as something artists continually interpret: what gets received, questioned, refused, transformed, and ultimately passed forward.

Smith holds a particular relationship to the history represented by Shaping Inheritance, having served on the inaugural selection committee for the Charles Gaines MFA Fellowship, which selected AK Jenkins and Erick Benitez for its first cohort.

2:00–2:45 PM - CURATING INHERITANCE

Jheanelle Brown + jeffrey martín

What happens when eight distinct artistic practices are placed into relation?

Curator Jheanelle Brown joins Shaping Inheritance curator and participating artist jeffrey martín for a conversation about what becomes visible when these works occupy a shared space.

Beginning with Brown’s response to the exhibition, the conversation considers how curatorial frameworks create relationships between otherwise autonomous practices and what it means to curate a fellowship while simultaneously being one of its inheritors.

3:00–3:45 PM -SHAPING INHERITANCE: THE FELLOWS

Participating Charles Gaines MFA Fellows

The final conversation turns toward the artists themselves.

Rather than presenting their practices individually, the Fellows enter into conversation about what they have inherited, what they transform or refuse, what became visible through encountering one another’s work, and whether gathering these eight practices changes how the Fellowship itself might be understood.

As Shaping Inheritance approaches its conclusion, the conversation asks: what might be carried forward from this gathering?

3:45–4:00 PM - Audience Q&A + Closing Reflections