If inheritance names the conditions into which we arrive, what does it mean to shape what comes next?
On the closing day of Shaping Inheritance, artists, curators, and the Charles Gaines MFA Fellows gather for an afternoon of conversations examining artistic inheritance not as a fixed lineage, but as an active process of interpretation, transformation, refusal, and transmission.
Shaping Inheritance is the first exhibition to bring together every Charles Gaines MFA Fellow at CalArts. Across eight distinct practices, the exhibition asks how artists encounter systems they did not create themselves—images, languages, institutions, technologies, histories, ecologies, objects, and forms of kinship—and how those inherited conditions might become material for something otherwise.
Rather than tracing a shared aesthetic lineage from Charles Gaines, the exhibition considers what happens when a concern with systems moves through different histories, materials, practices, and ways of living.
Across three conversations, the closing program moves from inheritance → curatorial interpretation → the Fellows → what gets carried forward.
