Shaunté Gates

About

Shaunté Gates (b. 1979) lives and works in Washington, D.C. He studied at  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 caused a profound shift in  his artistic practice. His recent work employs a multidisciplinary approach,  layering photography, painting, and video to create dreamlike landscapes  that explore labyrinthine social constructs and the physical sites that house  and perpetuate them. Echoing 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 “Men  of Change” four-year traveling exhibition spanning ten museums, including  the International African American Museum in Charleston, SC, California  African American Museum, Cincinnati Underground Railroad Museum and  Washington State History Museum (2019-23). He has been awarded the  Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Grant (2022) and residencies with The  Nicholson Project (2023), The Kennedy Center (2019) and Washington  Project for the Arts (2018; 2017). Gates has work in esteemed private  collections and institutions such as the Studio Museum in Harlem and Munson, Utica, NY. He has completed many public art commissions including  Transcending, a painting commemorating the 140th anniversary of Howard  University School of Law.