Theaster Gates

Gates began his Civil Tapestry series, stitching salvaged fire hoses over wooden supports, in 2011. The resulting works appear abstract and minimalist but are historically charged; they evoke the Black American struggle during the Civil Rights movement, in which law enforcers broke up peaceful civilian marches with the violent use of high-pressure hoses. In 2012 Gates introduced tar as a medium in his work, with a series of textural, high-relief paintings in tribute to his father’s occupation as a roofer. Sometimes featuring footprints and drips, these paintings literally and metaphorically equate making a roof with making art. In a subsequent series of scarred bronze wall reliefs, he immortalized the rough, tar-papered surfaces of Chicago roofs in a sculptural material that is ancient, noble, and universal.

Gates started the Black Madonna Press in 2018, distributing materials drawn from his expansive collection of print media and archival photography. His project Black Image Corporation (2018–) promoted new awareness of the legendary Johnson Publishing Company, which was responsible for circulating positive and glamorous images of Black middle-class life through culturally influential magazines such as Ebony and Jet. Selections of images from the vast Johnson Publishing Company archive, along with relics from the corporate offices, have featured in Gates’s exhibitions at institutions including the Kunstmuseum Basel (2018), Osservatorio Fondazione Prada, Milan (2018–19, traveled to Gropius Bau, Berlin), and Haus der Kunst, Munich (2019–20).

Since 2009 Gates has led the Black Monks, a musical ensemble channeling traditional secular and religious Black music through experimental forms of improvisation and dialogue. Gates has brought his performative practice into the museum, including his ongoing series Processions—held at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, between 2016 and 2019—which investigates “sonic imagination” and celebrates Black history and culture through music workshops and recitals. In 2019 Gates brought B.A.R. (Black Artists Retreat), a project of cultural exchange that he has held yearly since 2013 at his studio in Chicago, to the Park Avenue Armory in New York.

Gates is a professor at the University of Chicago and director of artist initiatives at the Lunder Institute for American Art at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. He was artist-in-residence at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, in 2018–19. In 2017 Gates was awarded the Artes Mundi 6 prize and received the French government’s Chevalier de l’Ordre national de la Légion d’honneur.