Shaunté Gates

Shaunté Gates (b. 1979) lives and works in Washington, D.C. He attended the Duke Ellington School of the Arts and Bowie State University. Early in his career, Gates trained in oil painting and portraiture, where his subsequent experience as a television motion graphics editor led to a profound shift in his artistic practice. His recent work takes a multidisciplinary approach, layering photography, painting, and video to create dreamlike landscapes that explore labyrinthine social constructs and the physical places that house and perpetuate them. Drawing on the aesthetics of paper theater, his compositions unfold like intricate stage sets, where layered imagery and shifting perspectives evoke a sense of constructed reality and theatrical illusion.

Gates was a participating artist in the Smithsonian Institution's four-year traveling exhibition "Men of Change," which toured ten museums, including the International African American Museum in Charleston, SC, the California African American Museum, the Cincinnati Underground Railroad Museum, and the Washington State History Museum (2019-23). He has been awarded the Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Grant (2022) and residencies at The Nicholson Project (2023), The Kennedy Center (2019), and Washington Project for the Arts (2018; 2017). Gates' work is held in prestigious private collections and institutions such as the Studio Museum in Harlem and Munson, Utica, NY. He has completed numerous public art commissions, including Transcending, a painting commemorating the 140th anniversary of Howard University School of Law.