Gregory Coates is an established artist and educator working in painting, drawing, sculpture, assemblage, and installation. Incorporating unconventional materials such as feathers, textiles, rubber tubes, and scrub brushes, Coates not only explores the nature of these materials and their textural possibilities, but also provides a subtle undercurrent of social implication. Manual labor, love, grief, and racial identity are quietly evoked in compositions that might at first appear as pure, minimalist abstraction, but emerge nonetheless from lived experience.

“I am not a story teller, but I feel the work I make tells ‘the story’ on its own. I have always had a conversation or narrative about humanity in my work, something I call ‘Social Abstraction.’ Bicycle inner tubes hanging off the ceiling reaching to the floor but not holding anything; feathers which are elusive and light yet adhesive on the picture plane; plastic wrap which is translucent yet solid. My work always includes a kind of contradiction, a way to look at it in several ways. The story told: take a closer look, don’t judge, don’t assume. Be individual, be what you want or what you can be. All of this is social commentary – I just prefer to be questioning rather than explaining.” - Gregory Coates

Coates studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture and the Corcoran School of Art, and has been teaching for many years at the School of Visual Arts in New York. He has held multiple artist residencies in Japan, South Africa, Berlin, and London. He has been the recipient of numerous prestigious awards, including the Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship Grant; Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant; Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant; Edward Mitchell Bannister Society’s Award for Excellence in Art; New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship; and an Arts Ovation Award from the Allentown Arts Commission. He regularly exhibits in solo and group exhibitions around the globe, and his work is held in a number of significant private and public collections, including:

-    Smithsonian Institute of American Art
-    National Museum of African American History and Culture
-    Studio Museum in Harlem 
-    Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts
-    Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
-    Georgia Museum of Art

-    3-D Foundation Sculpture Park (Verbier, Switzerland)
-    Paul Pozzoza Museum (Düsseldorf, Germany)
-    City of Düsseldorf, Germany
-    Pennsylvania Convention Center
-    Microsoft, Inc.
-    Phillip Morris Corporation
-    Coca Cola Bottling Company
-    Bank of Delaware
-    Beneficial Corporation
-    City of Obama, Japan