Few artists make work as wide ranging as that of the Chicago-based multidisciplinary artist Theaster Gates, whose art encompasses ceramics, sculpture, music, performance, film, and land development. It also includes what art historians generally call social practice—a medium that focuses on art as a means of social or political engagement—although Gates resoundingly rejects the term.
Gates’s projects may at times seem unrelated to one another; what connects classic clay vessels, canvases covered with roofing material, a Black Madonna figure, the revival of neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, and a neon sign reading “Burn Baby Burn” emblazoned above 5,000 records from the personal vinyl collection of a legendary DJ? In fact, there are identifiable threads running through the whole of his oeuvre.
“I’m a potter, which seems like a fairly humble vocation,” Gates told a Ted Talk audience in 2015. “I know a lot about pots. I’ve spent about 15 years making them. . . . I spent a lot of time at my wheel with mounds of clay trying stuff. . . . The limitations of my capacity, my ability, was based on my hands and my imagination, [and] if I wanted to make a really nice bowl and I didn’t know how to make a foot yet, I would have to learn how to make a foot—that process of learning has been very, very helpful to my life. I feel like, as a potter, you also start to learn how to shape the world.”
At Iowa State University, Gates studied urban planning and ceramics, then spent a life-altering year in Tokoname, Japan, sharpening his pottery skills, an experience that reverberates aesthetically and conceptually in his work to this day. He later received a master’s degree in religious studies and fine arts from the University of Cape Town. In addition, he is a musician; his ensemble, The Black Monks (formerly The Black Monks of Mississippi) makes experimental music rooted in Southern Black traditions.
In November, New York’s New Museum opened the midcareer survey “Theaster Gates: Young Lords and Their Traces,” which acknowledges his manifold influences, from his parents to writer bell hooks to film scholar Robert Bird to color-field artist Sam Gilliam. At the opening of the show, on view through February 5, 2023, he told viewers, “The art isn’t about art. The art is about deep belief in the power of human beings to make each other better, that we might all become our better selves.”
As an introduction to Gates’s art, here’s a look at six of his key works.
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The Rebuild Foundation (ongoing)
Image Credit: Sara Pooley/Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian Gallery, New York Gates’s most far-reaching work, the Rebuild Foundation (originally called Dorchester Projects), has entirely reimagined a distressed neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, transforming nearly 40 abandoned buildings over the past decade into an urban hub and arts destination. With exhibitions, affordable housing, studios, and workshops, among numerous other offerings, the Rebuild Foundation continues to grow.
Gates’s vision began in 2009 with a single-family home, now called the Archive House. Struck by the decay of his Grand Crossing neighborhood, Gates purchased the derelict property at 6916 Dorchester Avenue and turned it into a combination library, photo archive, and soul food kitchen where experiential meals were served to local residents and other guests to spur conversations about social issues. “I think about it as being a house first, a two-story building that was meant to sleep people and have them live, but also where they live with things in a really interesting way,” he explained in a 2012 video published by the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art.
Anchoring the project is the Stony Island Arts Bank, a “hard-core node of cultural activity,” Gates has said. Built in 1923 and sold to Gates for a dollar by the city, the 17,000-square-foot, carefully rehabbed former savings and loan houses Gates’s collections of artifacts from African American and art history, including a trove of 60,000 glass lantern slides once used for teaching and research by the University of Chicago’s art history department, the archive of the Johnson Publishing Company, publisher of Jet and Ebony magazines from the 1940s to 2016, the Frankie Knuckles Collection of vinyl albums belonging to the eponymous Chicago DJ and pioneer of 1980s house music, and the Edward J. Williams Collection of some 4,000 examples of “negrobilia”—objects illustrating painful stereotypes of Black people. A grant from the Mellon Foundation enables artists, musicians, and researchers to explore the four collections and produce new work.
“At the core of his artmaking is this impulse to collect, and not just to collect, but the labor and caretaking of archiving and cataloging that goes along with it,” says the Walker Art Center’s Victoria Sung, who co-curated the Minneapolis museum’s 2019 Gates exhibition “Assembly Hall.” “Gates is interested in objects as tangible things and understands that there is a material memory embedded in them,” she adds. “Part of his practice is continuously trying to breathe life into and draw our attention to the objects that surround us.”
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In Case of Race Riot II (2011)
Image Credit: Brooklyn Museum Fire hoses were once used to disperse peaceful civil rights demonstrations—notably in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, when police used high-pressure water hoses against nonviolent demonstrators for racial integration. Today they are a signature material for Gates. In Case of Race Riot II features a coiled fire hose in a gilt-framed shadow box, its title raising the alarm about deep-seated racism in America and the continued threat of violence against Black Americans.
Reclaimed fire hoses are also integral to Gates’s “Civil Tapestries,” which similarly reference African Americans’ ongoing struggle for racial justice, but through the language of abstract art. In works from this series, Gates creates large-scale stripe “paintings” out of pieces of fire hose, transforming a symbol of suffering into something sublime.
“Theaster has a long engagement with abstraction and the idea that it has a kind of spirituality,” says New Museum curator Gary Carrion-Murayari, who co-organized the institution’s current survey. “Some of the artists he’s been thinking about for many years are Frank Stella, Agnes Martin, and Kazimir Malevich, and how Black artists fit into narratives about American abstraction.” Indeed, works by Martin and Stella are interspersed among Gates’s pieces in the New Museum exhibition, highlighting the influence both have had on his art.
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Facsimile Cabinet of Women Origin Stories (2018)
Image Credit: Luc Demers/Courtesy of Colby College First shown as part of the Gates 2018 solo exhibition “Black Madonna” at the Kunstmuseum Basel, Facsimile Cabinet of Women Origin Stories recontextualizes post–World War II photos from the archive of the Chicago-based Johnson Publishing Company, publishers of Ebony and Jet. Geared to Black consumers, both magazines helped define 20th-century Black aesthetics, attitudes, and politics. With articles on African Americans from music icon Aretha Franklin to civil rights leader Rosa Parks to thriving, middle-class Black professionals, the magazines combated racial stereotypes and nonrepresentation of African Americans in the media.
Gates’s long, sleek Cabinet contains nearly 3,000 images of Black women. “Visitors are invited to take out photographs and essentially arrange their own narrative of images on top of the cabinet,” says Carrion-Murayari of the artist’s interactive installation. “As much as the Facsimile Cabinet is a historical archive, it’s a living, working archive that can be transformed and engaged with in a physical way, and in an incredibly beautiful manner.”
Facsimile Cabinet of Women Origin Stories epitomizes Gates’s notion of the artist as caretaker of social history—particularly, in his case, the material history of Black Chicago. “As the publishing company was disbanding, a lot was in danger of being lost,” explains Carrion-Murayari. “Theaster made an agreement to [use] the photographs, some of which were marked up with editing notes for how they would be appearing in the magazine. . . . For him, it was [an] act of preservation.”
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Tar Paintings (ongoing)
Image Credit: Ben Westoby/Courtesy of White Cube Tar, another significant material for Gates, has personal connotations. “My dad was a roofer, construction guy, he owned small businesses,” Gates said in his 2015 Ted Talk, “and at 80, he was ready to retire and his tar kettle was my inheritance.”
Gates’s abstract “Tar Paintings” debuted at his 2020 exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in New York. “Working [for] my dad was essentially my MFA,” Gates told The Washington Post in 2017. “I thought, ‘Could I reflect on roofing and through roofing channel all of my sculptural ambition and all of my painterly ambition?”
As with his “Civil Tapestries,” “Theaster’s tar paintings are representative of his expansive view of abstraction and what it might mean for a Black artist using that language today,” Carrion-Murayari says. In the New Museum retrospective, they are shown alongside the tar kettle that inspired the work.
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Black Chapel (2022)
Image Credit: Iwan Baan/Courtesy of Serpentine Galleries Last summer and early fall, Gates’s temporary public art installation Black Chapel graced the Serpentine Pavilion in London’s Kensington Gardens. Awarded the prestigious commission by the Serpentine Galleries in 2021—and delayed a year because of the pandemic—the artist built a structure that alludes to, among other things, the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Musgum mud huts in Cameroon, and the late-18th- and 19th-century bottle kilns of Stoke-on-Trent, center of the British ceramics industry. A circular structure made of black-stained plywood with a central oculus, the chapel hosted jazz and choral performances as well as clay workshops and discussion panels.
Gates has described the building as one that unifies several divergent interests: ceramics, the spiritual, and the built environment. Realized by the award-winning architecture firm Adjaye Associates, it is also partly a memorial to his late father: Seven new tar paintings hang in the chapel’s interior. “For most of my life, I’ve been thinking about what it means for a space to be spiritual,” says Gates, who sang in a church choir as a child. “I found when people get together and do things together, often something spiritual could happen.”
“Black Chapel is about Blackness,” Gates told the New York Times at the chapel’s opening“For me, Blackness has something to do with the ability to remain open, to remain optimistic, to remain active in one’s cultural and spiritual life.”
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Afro Mingei (2022–23)
Image Credit: Kevin Todora Over five months in 2022 and 2023, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas—which awarded Gates its prestigious Nasher Prize for contemporary sculpture in 2018—is presenting Afro Mingei, a new project by the artist that merges food, ceramics, and music. Situated in a ground-floor gallery with a separate entrance, the installation includes a DJ booth and a café serving Japanese and southern African American foods, all presented on dishes designed by Gates’s studio.
“Afro Mingei is a functioning restaurant and bar but is seeded with all of the essential elements of Theaster’s aesthetic,” says Nasher Sculpture Center’s chief curator, Jed Morse. “[He] “has created a space that [speaks of] his interest in the intersection between Black culture and Japanese culture. It’s also a platform for emerging artists of color, whether they are DJs, singers, or performers. It is a place to bring the community together.”
Afro Mingei reprises themes of generosity and hospitality seen early on in one of Gates’s first major works, Plate Convergence (2007): a seated dinner for a hundred guests, to whom the artist served traditional soul food on dishes ostensibly made by a famous Japanese ceramicist but in fact crafted by Gates himself.
“Sometimes when I look at Japanese pottery,” Gates told the New Museum’s artistic director, Massimiliano Gioni, “I think I am looking at God. I am looking at the godly creativity in people. I am looking at everyday people finding beauty in mud.”