Charles Gaines was born in Charleston, S.C., in 1944 and has been described as "one of the first, if not the first, African American, to work in the field of conceptual art." Gaines's 2008 work Manifestos, consisting of monumental graphite drawings of musical scores conceptually derived from four famous political manifestos, appeared in the Hammer exhibition All of this and nothing. Gaines lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the California Institute of the Arts.