He was also deeply involved in the Trinity United Church of Christ, where a young politician, Barack Obama, was a frequent presence. In high school he kept at it, decorating classmates’ sneakers and T-shirts, sometimes for a fee. He started expressing himself artistically at age 13, when he painted his Nikes to camouflage the wear and tear. Gaines loved Nikes, but he got only one pair a year - usually Nike Air Force 1s. He was born into a city and a world where Michael Jordan, whose Nike Air Jordans had become a streetwear staple, was everywhere. An image of the building is tattooed on Mr. His mother, Pamela Robinson, still lives there. Gaines was born on the Southeast Side of Chicago and raised in a building owned by his great-grandmother, Gladys Pelt. In September, “Benji,” his monochromatic rendering of Ben Wilson, a top basketball prospect who was killed in his Chicago neighborhood at 17 in 1984, sold for more than $20,000 at a Phillips charity auction. Gaines had his first solo show, “Painting the Blueprint,” at the Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects gallery in Lower Manhattan. “Some people don’t necessarily get Julian, but I get Julian because for years people didn’t get me.” “He’s speaking to the Black experience, and he’s not blinded by institution,” Mr. Whitner’s North Carolina home, along with paintings and sculptures by KAWS, Nina Chanel Abney and Jammie Holmes. Gaines, including “KAREN(S),” appear in Mr. Gaines has a key supporter in the art collector James Whitner, the chief executive of the Whitaker Group, the company behind the fashion labels A Ma Maniere, Social Status and APB. The neighbor ended up admitting to the police that she had caused the damage to the car, and the officers left soon afterward. Gaines was able to show them the images on his screen. As she approached him, ranting and pressing a finger to his chest, he recorded her with his phone. When he asked the neighbor, a white woman, to provide her insurance information, she threatened to call the police and report him for elder abuse, he said. Gaines went through himself, after a neighbor damaged his car two years ago, he said. “KAREN(S)” owed something to an experience Mr. It evoked a string of incidents involving women who had called the police on Black bystanders: a bird-watcher, a man entering his apartment building, an 8-year-old selling water. It was Pop Art with a political edge - a bold image of a white woman holding a phone to her ear, her expression stern, a tear running down her cheek. Gaines got widespread attention in 2020, when his series “KAREN(S)” was featured on the cover of New York magazine.
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