Born in Los Angeles, California in 1940, artist Gerald Hayes grew up in the American South. He received his Bachelor of Visual Arts from Auburn University and his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Hayes spent the early years of his artistic career in Champaign/Urbana, Illinois, where he taught drawing and painting at the University of Illinois. While living there, he created groundbreaking works using spray paint, which he favored as a medium at the time due to the unique physical distance from the surface it offered him. In 1966, Hayes created roughly fifty spray paintings, experimenting with different angles and intensities of paint. Using pieces of cardboard as stencils, Hayes positioned the can obliquely in order to create a shadow, which added an illusion of depth to the two-dimensional works.
Hayes’ spray paint works were only his first venture into three-dimensionality. In the years following, Hayes turned to large-scale sculpture, focusing on themes of movement and maintaining the grid patterns he first created in the spray paintings.
In 1968, Hayes moved from Illinois to New York City. Here, he taught at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he held a variety of prestigious positions between 1971 and 2006. In his artistic practice, Hayes continued experimenting with various techniques such as ink-drawn circles, photography, painting, and often the combination of two or more of these methods. Although his medium varied, Hayes continued to focus on experimentation with space and rhythm.
Hayes has been featured in many notable group exhibitions, including Compass in Hand: Selections from The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection (2009-10, Museum of Modern Art, NY) and Concept, Performance, Documentation, Language (2016, Mitchell Algus Gallery, NY). Hayes has also received solo shows at the Harm Bouckaert Gallery, NY; Stockton State College Gallery, Galloway, NJ; and Southern Cross University Art Museum, Lismore, Australia, among others.
Although Hayes spent the majority of his career living in New York City, he now lives with his family in Massachusetts, where he has a studio and continues to create new work.