Gregory Coates

Gregory Coates (born March 5, 1961) is an African-American artist known for working in the realm of social abstraction. Coates also works in three-dimensional formats including wall sculpture, sculpture in the round, installation art, and public sculpture, and less frequently in video and performance.  

Gregory Coates
Gregory Coates, Fences, 2011, pvc pipe, rubber, pigment.
Born (1961-03-05) March 5, 1961
Washington D.C.
Alma materCorcoran School of Art
Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture
StyleSocial abstraction
three-dimensional art
video
performance

Early Life and Education

Gregory Coates was born in Washington D.C. on March 5, 1961. He grew up in the Carver Langston Neighborhood in the North East part of the district.[1] Coates, the oldest of eight children, grew up in a working class household where his mother and father worked to support him, his six sisters and brother. .[2]

Gregory Coates attended the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C. from 1980-1982 and later the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture 1990.[3]

Career

During the mid 1980s Coates traveled to Germany, where he began studying at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. While in the Germany Coates experienced events leading up the fall of the Iron Curtain and the impact of those changes. Upon returning from Europe, Coates began living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.[4]

Coates met artist Al Loving during the late 1980s, through his (now) wife Kiki Nienaber. He was working primarily as a figurative painter and Loving encouraged Coates to extend his practice into assemblage. Coates credits this as a breakthrough that allowed him to embrace the physical aspect of painting and to mature as an artist.[5]

Then during the late 1990s Coates took an artist residency in Capetown, South Africa. In 1996 Coates experienced aftermath of the official end of apartheid and encountered extreme poverty, which resulted in another shift in his work via the use of repurposed materials. He saw this as a moral imperative in response the gross wastefulness of industrialized societies and the economic inequities he witnessed while living in Cape Town.[6] As a result, Coates began using almost exclusively, recycled materials to create his work. Materials used included feathers, bike tubes, cardboard, crumpled papers, dirt, vinyl records, and the heads of push brooms, which he pairs with provocative titles to address topics such as the problematics of Cold-War politics, poverty, racism, domestic labor, and Black aesthetics.[7]

SMH Director Kinshasha Holman congratulates 1996 -1997 Artists in Residence June Clark, Gregory Coates and Vladimir Cybil  

Collections

Gregory Coates' artwork is in the collections of cultural institutions around the world such as:[8]

A large commissioned work by Coates is installed at the Pennsylvania Convention Center (Extension) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.[6] Coates did a residency and installation in Verbier 3-D Foundation in Verbier, Switzerland in February, 2011, in a series called "Go Tell It on the Mountain: Towards a New Monumentalism."[10]

References
  1. "Gregory Coates, Claiming Feathers – Art Spiel". Retrieved 2020-10-05.
  2. "GREGORY COATES: ACTUAL AND IMPLIED | 25 October - 7 December 2019 - Overview". Monica King Contemporary. Retrieved 2020-10-05.
  3. "Gregory Coates resume" (PDF). N'namdi Contemporary. October 5, 2020.
  4. "Art Land - Gregory Coates biography". Art Land. Retrieved June 22, 2020.
  5. Edwards, Jeff. "Consider This. An Interview with Gregory Coates". Art Pulse Magazine. Retrieved June 22, 2020.
  6. "ABSTRACT TRUTHS: A STUDIO VISIT WITH CONTEMPORARY ARTIST GREGORY COATES". Sugar Cane Magazine. August 6, 2018. Retrieved June 22, 2020.
  7. Hutchinson, Cori (December 2019). "Actual and Implied: New Work by Gregory Coates Gently Bristles". White Hot Magazine. Retrieved June 22, 2020.
  8. Aaron, Sims (May 2017). "Gregory Coates Brooklyn Arts Fellowship Gallery". The Art Guide. Retrieved June 22, 2020.
  9. "Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of African American History and Culture - online collections catalogue". Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of African American Museum of History and Culture. 2013. Retrieved June 22, 2020.
  10. "Gregory Coates - Verbier 3-D Foundation". Retrieved 2021-01-13.
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