Theaster Gates

Theaster Gates (born August 28, 1973) is an American social practice installation artist and a professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago. He was born in Chicago, Illinois, where he still lives and works. Gates' work has been shown at major museums and galleries internationally and deals with urban planning, religious space, and craft. He works to revitalize underserved neighborhoods by combining urban planning and art practices. Gates' art practice responds to disinvestment in African American urban communities, particularly in the wake of the Financial crisis of 2007–2008, addresses the importance of formal archives for remembering and valuing Black cultural forms, and disrupts artistic canons, especially those of Post-painterly abstraction and Color field painting.
Early life and education.
Theaster Gates was born and raised in East Garfield Park on the West Side of Chicago. He was the youngest of nine children and the only son. His father was a roofer, and his mother a school teacher. His sisters passed on their interest in civil rights activism, and the family attended a Baptist church where Gates, a choir member, became interested in performance. Gates attended Lane Technical High School. In 1996, he graduated from Iowa State University with a B.S. in Urban Planning and Ceramics. After college, Gates worked primarily in ceramics and spent a year in Tokoname, Japan, studying pottery. He decided he wanted to explore religion in South Africa, and in 1998 he received an M.A. at the University of Cape Town in Fine Arts and Religious Studies.
Work.
Early Work.
Gates' early work centered on his training as a ceramicist and his study of comparative religions, and "many of his early projects addressed the shared significance of pottery in Japanese and African American cultures."
In 2007, Gates organized a conceptual exhibition at the Hyde Park Art Center titled "Plate Convergence" in which he staged a fictional event as an elaborate backstory for ceramic plates he had made. The fiction involved Shoji Yamaguchi, a Japanese-born potter who had emigrated to the United States after WWII and took up residence in Mississippi, where he married a local black woman and Civil Rights activist and designed a plate especially suitable for the cuisine of black people. The plate became a centerpiece of dinner parties and salons for discussing art and politics. In Gates' words, "As the story went, [Yamaguchi] and his wife died in a car accident in 1991 and their son founded the Yamaguchi Institute to continue their vision of social transformation. I made ceramic plates, videotaped highly curated dinners and found a space for an exhibition of the ceramics and video. We gave a huge Japanese soul-food dinner, made by a Japanese chef and my sister, in honor of the Yamaguchis and their dinners. A young mixed-race artist enacted the role of their son and thanked everyone for coming."
In 2008, Gates created his second fictional institution, with the exhibition "Tea Shacks, Collard Greens and the Preservation of Soul" at a temporary gallery space in Chicago that Gates dubbed the Center for the Proliferation of Afro-Asian Artifacts.
Rebuild Foundation.
Gates is the founder and artist Director of the Rebuild Foundation, a non-profit organization focused on cultural-driven redevelopment and affordable space initiatives in under-resourced communities. Under Gates' leadership, the Rebuild Foundation currently manages projects in the Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood of Chicago. Rebuild received official 501(c)3 status in December 2010. Program sites include the Stony Island Arts Bank, the Black Cinema House, the Dorchester Art + Housing Collaborative, Archive House, and Listening House.
For the Dorchester Projects, Gates restored and converted vacant buildings into cultural institutions with archival collections from the South Side. Gates's Rebuild Foundation has renovated two houses on Dorchester Avenue, now called the Archive House and the Listening House. The Archive House holds 14,000 architecture books from a closed bookshop. The Listening House holds 8,000 records purchased at the closing of Dr. Wax Records. 
Stony Island Arts Bank.
In 2013, Gates purchased the Stony Island State Savings Bank from the city of Chicago. The bank, now known as the Stony Island Arts Bank, contains the book collection of John H. Johnson, founder of "Ebony" and "Jet" magazines; the record collection of Frankie Knuckles, the godfather of house music; and slides of the collections of the University of Chicago and the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2015, his Stony Island work was included in the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial. The physical location of the Bank has also allowed Gates to host temporary exhibitions of artists, such as Glenn Ligon.
Work with Archival Collections.
By working with archival collections centered in African American history, Gates' work addresses issues of history, memory, and the value ascribed to Black history and cultural production. His 2017 piece "plantation lullabies" involved 4,000 pieces of what Gates describes as "negrobilia." This included: old sheet music, signs, pamphlets, coin banks, figurines - as part of the Edward Williams Collection. Similarly, his "Black Image Corporation" involved the use of John H. Johnson's photographic archive - with special focus being given to Black image-makers who were prominent during the civil rights era - Moneta Sleet, Jr and Isaac Sutton.
University of Chicago Arts and Public Life initiative.
Since 2011, Gates has been the director of Arts and Public Life at the University of Chicago. In this role, he oversees staff at the Arts Incubator in Washington Park and the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, a wide network of resident and visiting artists (including current and former participants in our residency program), community participants, programmatic partners, and friends. He is also a full professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University.
Gates is also the leader of the Place Lab, a partnership between Arts + Public Life and the Harris School of Public Policy, which is working to design and implement new approaches to urban development. The Place Lab partners with the demonstration cities of Gary, Akron, Detroit, and other Knight Foundation communities.
Other exhibitions and performances.
In January 2014 he designed a million-dollar installation for the South Side's 95th Street subway terminal. It is the largest public art project in the history of the Chicago Transit Authority. He was participant at the 2012 DOCUMENTA (13) art show in Kassel, Germany, the 2010 Whitney Biennial in New York, the Milwaukee Art Museum in 2010, the 2010 Art Chicago fair. He was included in "Hand+Made: The Performative Impulse in Art and Craft", at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and in 2013 had a solo show, "13th Ballad", at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. On May 30, 2014, Gates and jazz pianist Jason Moran led a one-time performance entitled "Looks of a Lot" as part of the "Symphony Center Presents Jazz" series and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's "Truth to Power Festival."
In October 2015, Gates created an installation at Temple Church, Bristol, England. Built in co-operation with its owner English Heritage, "Sanctum" will provide a venue with 24 hours of music and performance over 24 days, in a performance event funded by Arts Council England and developed as part of Bristol 2015 Green Capital.
In October 2020, Gates opened a large scale show at Gagosian Gallery in New York City. The show titled is "Black Vessel". The show explores themes of family life, maternal love, and manual labor. Many of the materials he used in the show are roofing materials, an homage to his father who worked as a roofer. The central installation is the main gallery, which Gates lined with bricks fired black at a South Carolina brickworks. Gates cited the COVID-19 pandemic and the time he spent alone as having created an environment within which to incubate his ideas.
His exhibition "Future Histories: Theaster Gates and Cauleen Smith", is at the SF MOMA from October 2020-May 2021.