Collaging with … Shaunté Gates
Artist-led series
To accompany Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage, The Phillips Collection presents a dynamic artist-led adult series exploring the depth of collaging followed by a reception with the artist. Each Sunday from August 4-September 1, an internationally renowned artist will share their unique creative process and lead the participants in the creation of an artwork. Each session highlights a different form of collaging. Materials included. All levels welcome.
About Shaunté Gates
Shaunté Gates is based in Washington, DC, where he was born and raised. Gates’s works across mixed media collage and video subvert landscapes with architecture embedded with cultural symbologies and caste categorizations. The collage works have moved from canvas to wood in response to the needs of the layering of fabrics, canvas, paper, coins, and photographs. Gates’s use of found materials evokes the energy and cultural relevance of their site of origin and the popular culture referenced within these works. Gates refers to these landscapes as “Land of Myth,” and as such denotes, mythologies are layered within the materials. Gates produces dreamscape-like compositions rife with cinematic moments of beauty, chaos and glory depicting the labyrinth of social constructs we are all wading through. The works maybe most succinctly described as psychogeography, an intersection of psychology and geography. It focuses on our psychological experiences of the city and reveals or illuminates forgotten, discarded, or marginalized aspects of the urban environment.
He is a participating artist in Smithsonian Institution’s “Men of Change” four-year (2019-2022) traveling exhibition. The exhibition spans ten museums including California African American Museum, Cincinnati Underground Railroad Museum, and Washington State History Museum. Gates has work in esteemed private collections, and an acquisition by the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Collection. He has many public art commissions from schools throughout DC, including Transcending, a painting commemorating the 140th anniversary of Howard University School of Law.
IMAGE: Shaunté Gates, The Great Escape Sometimes
