Shaunté Gates: The Night Before: Poppies & Parachutes

Marc Straus is pleased to present Shaunté Gates’ inaugural solo exhibition at the gallery, The Night Before: Poppies & Parachutes. The show opens at 57 Walker Street with an artist reception on Friday, January 9 from 5pm to 8pm, and will be on view through February 28, 2026.

Gates’ first exposure to the power of visual storytelling began as a child, at his Uncle Homer’s home. The owner of a continually growing video archive of VHS and Betamax that overflowed across multiple bookshelves, Homer recorded movies from television broadcasts and borrowed tapes, creating a library that spanned the history of cinema from classics to new releases. The aesthetic of commercial Hollywood films that inspired Gates the most — and which continues to influence his artistic practice — are the expansive panoramas that in spite of their grand surroundings reveal intimate knowledge of the onscreen characters.

The foundation for each piece is a plank of wood, which occasionally makes an appearance among the swirl of printed media, personal photographs, drawings, tissue paper, and other materials. While reminiscent of torn, layered wheatpaste — a common sight in America’s cities  — Gates’s compositions are a carefully orchestrated whirlwind. In almost every composition of the show is a flock of descending parachutes that give the multidimensional tableaus a unifying and surreal leitmotif. 

Among these intersecting realities, the viewers’ eye is quickly drawn to the works’ figures: in the midst of tension, challenged, yet undeniably heroic. The viewer does not know the details of the conflict, but the fortitude and hope are apparent. Everyone is in a great hurry, Black figures, not running from but running to. Gates’ world is about competition, about succeeding and overcoming, looking to the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians to create his visual lexicon, parallel to the auteurs of Hollywood’s Golden Age. A native of Washington, DC, Gates’s marble statues and Ionic columns also look to the architecture of his hometown and its role in the mythologization of the United States. 

In Between Columns and The Landing, Gates transforms two characters from the 1975 coming-of-age film Cooley High, a classic of African American cinema. Cochise and Johnny Mae are in many ways the archetypal pair of high school lovers. Through Gates’s lens, we see them amidst a grand spectacle of pharaonic charioteers and a sky full of parachutes where their tenderness shines through. 

Shaunté Gates was born in 1979 in Washington, D.C., where he continues to live. In 2025, he was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Moss Arts Center at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia. In 2022, he received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award and in 2019 he was an artist in residence at the Kennedy Center, Washington, DC. His work has been highlighted in the Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, Town & Country, and the Washington Post, among other publications and he has exhibited at the 21c Museum Hotel, Louisville; American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, Washington, DC; and California African American Museum, Los Angeles among others.  His pieces are included in the collections of the Howard University School of Law, Washington, DC and Studio Museum of Harlem, a bequest of Peggy Cooper Cafritz, among other institutions.