![Untitled (Seven Panels), 2022, Acrylic paint on wood, in seven parts, Overall dimensions: 96 1/4 x 128 1/2 inches, 244.5 x 326.4 cm [Each panel: 96 1/4 x 11 1/2 inches], 244.5 x 29.2 cm, MMG#34926](https://img.artlogic.net/w_736,h_736,c_limit/exhibit-e/5a3bb3fed9edde023b8b4568/428796ddf46f40ee1c7770b0490dd461.jpeg)
Rico Gatson in his studio, Brooklyn, NY, 2024.
RICO GATSON (b. 1966 in Augusta, GA) received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Bethel College in 1989 and his Master of Fine Arts from Yale School of Art in 1991.
Gatson has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at the Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA; USF Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, FL; Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL; Scott Miller Projects, Birmingham, AL; Highpoint Center for Printmaking, Minneapolis, MN; Children’s Museum of the Arts, New York, NY; Metropolitan Transportation Authority, New York, NY; Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York, NY; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Samsøñ Projects, Boston, MA; Studio 10, Brooklyn, NY; and the Wright Museum of Art, Beloit College, Beloit, WI.
His work has been included in group exhibitions at numerous international institutions including the Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, Detroit, MI; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Essl Museum, Vienna, Austria; Jewish Museum, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, Austria; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY; Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA; Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; and La Vieille Charité, Marseille, France.
His work may be found in the collections of the Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL; Cheekwood Museum of Art, Nashville, TN; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Malcolm X Institute, Wabash College, Crawfordsville, IN; Mead Art Museum, Amherst, MA; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, MN; Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, NC; National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C.; North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks, ND; Peter Norton Family Foundation, Santa Monica, CA; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT.
He is the recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award for Visual Artists; Prized Pieces Video Award from the National Black Programming Consortium; Oil Bar Ltd. Award for Excellence in Sculpture from Yale School of Art; and The Pew Charitable Trusts Graduate Fellowship.
Gatson lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
We are thrilled to return to The Armory Show for the fair's 2023 edition at the Javits Center.
Rico Gatson: Visible Time at the USF Contemporary Art Museum is reviewed by Tom Winchester for Art Critter.
Rico Gatson: Visible Time is now on view at the USF Contemporary Art Museum.
Miles McEnery Gallery is delighted to present an exhibition of works by gallery artists at the 2023 edition of EXPO CHICAGO.
Works by Rico Gatson are on view throughout Chicago as part of EXPO CHICAGO's OVERRIDE | A Billboard Project.
Rico Gatson’s Untitled (Triple Consciousness) (2022) is on view as part of The Social Justice Billboard Project at George Floyd Square in Minneapolis.
Rico Gatson is included in Poor People’s Art: A (Short) Visual History of Poverty in the United States, now on view at the USF Contemporary Art Museum.
Spectral Visions is featured in Galerie Magazine.
Rico Gatson's exhibition Spectral Visions is included in the digital weekly of Air Mail
Rico Gatson is featured on the Cerebral Women Art Talks podcast.
Rico Gatson's Toni #2 (2021) has been acquired by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Durham, NC.
Rico Gatson is included in the exhibition Color Code at the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts.
The multidisciplinary artist’s bold and bright works shine a spotlight on the African-American experience and pay homage to some of its historical icons
Rico Gatson is the second artist to create murals for the Birmingham Museum of Art's Wall to Wall installation series.
Rico Gatson's "Untited (Flag IIII) is included in the exhibition Light Play at the Birmingham Museum of Art.
Rico Gatson is included in the show "The Artist's Eye" at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Film Archive.
Curator and advisor Lolita Cros in conversation with artists Bahar Behbahani, Rico Gatson, and MTA Arts & Design director Sandra Bloodworth.
Rico Gatson's work Bird, 2015 is included in the exhibition "Black American Portraits" on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through 17 April 2022.
“In nature, light creates the color. In the picture, color creates the light. Perhaps we can all appreciate some light after the dark.” Hans Hoffman
What better way to begin a new journey, a new path and the re-opening of society than with something that illuminates our eyes and our souls? The newest show, LIGHT, has conquered and is shining brightly on the walls of Miles McEnery’s newly renovated thrid Chelsea location.
Gallery Chronicle
On “Sam Gilliam: Existed Existing” at Pace Gallery, New York, “Martin Puryear” at Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, “Jack Whitten: I Am the Object” at Hauser & Wirth, New York & “Rico Gatson: Ghosts” at Miles McEnery Gallery, New York.
From Rico Gatson’s mystical investigation of Blackness to Audrey B. Heckler’s prolific collection of Outsider art
By Wallace Ludel and Gabriella Angeleti
Our editors and writers scour the city each week for the most thoughtful, relevant and exciting new exhibitions and artworks on view at galleries, museums and public venues across all five boroughs of New York. This week we recommend:
"Artist Rico Gatson (Instagram: @rico_gatson) joins us for New Social Environment #119, hosted by painter and Rail Editor-at-Large Tom McGlynn (Instagram: @tom_mcglynn), for a discussion on Gatson's work, subjective abstraction, transcendental jazz, the use of geometry, rhythm, color, among other subversive political and social underpinnings, and so on leading to his upcoming show of paintings Miles McEnery Gallery (opening November 19th, 2020). Poet Don Yorty (Instagram: @donyorty) closes the event with a reading from his poetry postcards."
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – MILES McENERY GALLERY is delighted to announce its representation of Rico Gatson.
Rico Gatson is a Brooklyn based mixed media artist working across abstraction and figuration. With a multifaceted practice that spans painting, video, sculpture and installation, Gatson considers himself an object-maker inspired by Conceptualism, Afro-Futurism and spirituality.
ARTnews in Brief: Miles McEnery Now Represents Rico Gatson—and More
Mixed media artist Rico Gatson has joined the New York–based Miles McEnery Gallery, where he will have a solo exhibition opening November 19.
Mural brings civil rights inspiration to CityPlace’s social setting
"WEST PALM BEACH — Artist Rico Gatson is bringing the legacy of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. to downtown West Palm Beach’s CityPlace, with a series of multi-colored triangles in progress called Mountain Top, on the center’s Gardenia Garage, harkening to the assassinated reverend’s final speech."
Icons of Bronx History Are Honored in Rico Gatson’s New York Subway Murals
"Figures like Justice Sonia Sotomayor, James Baldwin, and Maya Angelou’s take center stage in the artist’s new MTA mosaics for the 167th Street station."
Black Lives Shine in Rico Gatson’s New Show
"Rico Gatson’s studio, in Bushwick, is awash in color and geometry. Tall rectangular panels painted in intricate patterns lean against a wall like abstract totems. Other planks lie across tables, works in progress involving ovals and circles. Large paintings on the wall alternate geometric sections in red, black, orange, yellow, and green with others in black and white. Nearby, silhouettes taken from vintage images of Black Panthers and civil rights protesters stand beneath strong colored vertical stripes or radiating lines."
RICO GATSON: Icons 2007 - 2017
"When elevating a human subject to sainthood or, at least making them an object of veneration, an artist needs to consider practically how it is that light or beams of pure energy will emanate from their being. Rico Gatson’s exhibition Icons 2007–2017 is just such an exercise in catapulting the human into the supernatural realm. We are watching an artist doing what artists do best: rendering the unimaginable into the visual and the unspeakable into human terms."
How Radical Can A Portrait Be?
"Icons, a solo exhibition of recent works on paper by the artist Rico Gatson, curated by Hallie Ringle, takes this ecstasy in personhood and makes it as visible as people themselves. Gatson appropriates old photographic images of famous black Americans—Zora Neale Hurston, Gil Scott-Heron, Nina Simone, Marvin Gaye—and surrounds them with bright, colorful lines that shoot outward from the personages to the borders of the page."
