Malik Gaines

Gaines received a B.A. in History from UCLA (1996), an MFA in Writing from Cal Arts' School of Critical Studies (1999), and a PhD in Theater and Performance Studies from UCLA (2011).[9]

Gaines was an associate professor in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University and now an Associate Professor at UC San Diego.[10]

Alongside his performance practice, Gaines is a writer and scholar whose work has been published in Art Journal, Women & Performance, Artforum,[11] and BOMB Magazine.[12] Gaines has written essays for numerous exhibition catalogs and artist's books, for artists including Lorraine O’Grady, Jacolby Satterwhite, Nick Cave, Senga Nengudi, Judson Dance Theater, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Julius Eastman, Wu Tsang, amongst others. Gaines has curated a number of performance programs and exhibitions, such as Made in L.A. at the Hammer Museum in 2012 and LAXART.[13][14][15][16][17]

Gaines is the author of Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible, which analyzes black art and music in the 1960s to trace out how performances of blackness rescripts and retools dominant discourses which constrain and contain black life. Reading artists through three registers—blackness (which he calls the "vanguard of negativity, the avant-garde of difference"), the period of the 1960s, and the transnational routes between the United States, West Africa, and Western Europe—Gaines explores how the "destabilizing excess of difference" challenge visual representation across sexual, racial, and political lines. For instance, in the first chapter "Nina Simone's Quadruple Consciousness," Gaines riffs on W. E. B. Du Bois' double consciousness to explore Nina Simone's "performance position that marshals paradoxical and simultaneous differences to present a provisional form of subjectivity." Drawing from Simone's Four Women and her performance practice of interjection, Gaines locates the political affect of Simone's work through the tensions inherent to the spaces between the multiple narratives, singer, and audience, reworking gendered, racialized fragmentation towards an act of political and personal agency.[18]

In 2021,The Whitney Museum[19] and Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles[20] presented a 20-year survey of work by My Barbarian which included an exhibition, performance program, and a book publication.[21]