Michael Bailey Gates

Michael Bailey-Gates entered the art world in 2015 upon graduating from the School of Visual Arts and receiving the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation Award. Their portraits, rooted in classical studio practice, challenge familiar structures of identity and gender. A close community of collaborators often figures in these images, lending each piece an incisive undercurrent. Beyond fine art, Bailey-Gates’s perspective has appeared in collaborations with Valentino, Armani, and Ami, as well as in the pages of Vogue US, the New York Times, and Rolling Stone. In 2021, they released the monograph A Glint in the Kindling, offering a closer look at a body of work that continues to redefine conventional portraiture.