Award
Theaster Gates
Kiesler Prize 2021
Theaster Gates has been awarded the twelfth Frederick Kiesler Prize for Architecture and the Arts by a jury of his peers. The prize is awarded and endowed alternately every two years by the Republic of Austria and the City of Vienna and organized by the Vienna-based Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation. Gates was recognized for his extraordinary achievements in effecting social change, spatial transformation, and empowerment through his creative practice, which spans a range of artistic genres connected with a social agenda and can be easily linked to the late artist/architect Frederick Kiesler’s belief in the unification of the arts with the built environment and the social notion of space. The ceremony took place in Vienna on June 15, 2022.
Share
Theaster Gates’s Dorchester Projects (2006–), Chicago. Artwork © Theaster Gates. Photo: Sara Pooley
Related News
Award
Theaster Gates
Vincent Scully Prize 2023
Theaster Gates has been named the 2023 winner of the National Building Museum’s Vincent Scully Prize. Established in 1999, the award recognizes excellence in practice, scholarship, or criticism in architecture, historic preservation, and urban design. The jury was impressed by Gates’s collecting practice, which in addition to the constellation of Black spaces on Chicago’s South Side that he is actively creating, includes a number of historic record collections, such as those of the godfather of house music, Frankie Knuckles, and the Olympic runner Jesse Owens; over fifteen thousand objects from the legendary Johnson Publishing Company offices; Edward J. Williams and Ana Williams’s collection of approximately four thousand objects of “negrobilia” that make use of stereotypical images of Black people; over sixty thousand glass lantern slides from the University of Chicago; and the fourteen-thousand-volume Prairie Avenue Bookshop Archive.
Theaster Gates at his studio in Chicago, 2020. Photo: Lyndon French
Permanent Installation
Theaster Gates
Altar for the Unbanned
Theaster Gates’s Altar for the Unbanned has been permanently installed at the Harold Washington Library Center branch of the Chicago Public Library (CPL). It features spiral shelves of books that have been banned at different points in American history topped by a rotating neon sign of the word “unbanned.” Actively responding to rising demands for censorship through public organizing, CPL partnered with the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events to commission Gates’s installation. Library officials hope this public artwork will expose citizens to banned titles and encourage them to engage with these books.
Theaster Gates, Altar for the Unbanned, 2023, installation view, Harold Washington Library Center, Chicago Public Library © Theaster Gates
Installation
Theaster Gates
Min | Mon
Open from July 2, 2023
Luma Arles, France
www.luma.org
Min | Mon by Theaster Gates highlights the ritual, conviviality, and cultural hybridity often at the heart of his projects. Temple, a central structure using materials from Gates’s earliest exhibitions, deepens his exploration of “Afro-Mingei”—an inquiry into the intersection of Black cultural aesthetics and mingei, a Japanese movement honoring the handmade craftsmanship of ordinary utilitarian objects. Uniting key strands of his work, Gates has developed a participatory installation with a DJ booth featuring the artist’s own collection of vinyl records and a bar offering a new sake produced by Gates with the Hakurou brand in Tokoname, Japan. Min | Mon exemplifies Gates’s engagement with ceremony in Eastern culture while giving form to complex truths about craft, labor, value, and origin.
Theaster Gates, Temple Exercises, 2009 © Theaster Gates. Photo: Sara Pooley, courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2024
The Summer 2024 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring a detail of Roy Lichtenstein’s Bauhaus Stairway Mural (1989) on the cover.
Jane Fonda: On Art for a Safe and Healthy California
Art for a Safe and Healthy California is a benefit exhibition and auction jointly presented by Jane Fonda, Gagosian, and Christie’s to support the Campaign for a Safe and Healthy California. Here, Fonda speaks with Gagosian Quarterly’s Gillian Jakab about bridging culture and activism, the stakes and goals of the campaign, and the artworks featured in the exhibition.
Maurizio Cattelan: Sunday Painter
Curated by Francesco Bonami, Sunday is the first solo presentation of new work by Maurizio Cattelan in New York in over twenty years. Here, Bonami asks us to consider Cattelan as a political artist, detailing the potent and clear observations at the core of these works.
Frank Stella
In celebration of the life and work of Frank Stella, the Quarterly shares the artist’s last interview from our Summer 2024 issue. Stella spoke with art historian Megan Kincaid about friendship, formalism, and physicality.
Lacan: The Exhibition
On the heels of finishing a new novel, Scaffolding, that revolves around a Lacanian analyst, Lauren Elkin traveled to Metz, France, to take in Lacan, the exhibition. When art meets psychoanalysis, at the Centre Pompidou satellite in that city. Here she reckons with the scale and intellectual rigor of the exhibition, teasing out the connections between the art on view and the philosophy of Jacques Lacan.
Jim Shaw: A–Z
Charlie Fox takes a whirlwind trip through the Jim Shaw universe, traveling along the letters of the alphabet.
Laguna~B
An interview with Marcantonio Brandolini d’Adda, artist, designer, and CEO and art director of the Venice-based glassware company Laguna~B.
Highlights: Salone del Mobile Milano 2024
This year’s Salone del Mobile Milano brought together a range of installations, debuts, and collaborations from across the worlds of design, fashion, and architecture. We present a selection of these projects.
Richard Armstrong
Richard Armstrong, director emeritus of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, joins the Quarterly’s Alison McDonald to discuss his election to the board of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, as well as the changing priorities and strategies facing museums, foundations, and curators. He reflects on his various roles within museums and recounts his first meeting with Frankenthaler.
Oscar Murillo: Marks and Whispers
Ahead of two exhibitions—The Flooded Garden at Tate Modern, London, and Marks and Whispers at Gagosian, Rome—curator Alessandro Rabottini visited Oscar Murillo’s London studio to discuss the connections between them.
Vladimir Kagan’s First Collection: An Interview with Chris Eitel
Chris Eitel, Vladimir Kagan’s protégé and the current director of design and production at Vladimir Kagan Design Group, invited the Quarterly’s Wyatt Allgeier to the brand’s studio in New Jersey, where the two discussed the forthcoming release of the First Collection. The series, now available through holly hunt, reintroduces the first chair and table that Kagan ever designed—part of Eitel’s efforts to honor the furniture avant-gardist’s legacy while carrying the company into the future.
Lauren Halsey: Full and Complete Freedom
Essence Harden, curator at Los Angeles’s California African American Museum and cocurator of next year’s Made in LA exhibition at the Hammer Museum, visited Lauren Halsey in her LA studio as the artist prepared for an exhibition in Paris and the premiere of her installation at the 60th Biennale di Venezia this summer.