Charles Gaines was born in Charleston, South Carolina, and now lives and works in Los Angeles. He earned his MFA in 1967 as the first African American to be accepted into the MFA program at the School of Art and Design at the Rochester Institute of Technology. For more than forty years, Gaines has employed rule-based methodologies to investigate the disparities and slippages between visual and linguistic meaning. He is celebrated for his works on paper and acrylic glass, photographs, drawings, musical compositions, and installations. Gaines is the 2018 honored recipient of the REDCAT award.