About
In a single decade, Gates has incubated compelling new models for legacy building, social transformation, and making art. Encompassing sculpture, painting, ceramics, video, performance, and music, his art comes out of his explorations of value, economy, and material exchange in charged social contexts. In 2010, Gates created the Rebuild Foundation, a nonprofit platform aimed at galvanizing communities through neighborhood regeneration and the development of educational and arts programming and amenities. Many of the foundation’s initiatives have focused on the revitalization of Chicago’s South Side, creating hubs and archives for black culture, which serve as catalysts for discussions on race, equality, space, and history.
In the years since his participation in the 2010 Whitney Biennial, Gates has received widespread international recognition for stirring works such as 12 Ballads for Huguenot House at Documenta 13 (2012) and Gone Are the Days of Shelter and Martyr at the Venice Biennale in 2015, as well as major exhibitions at Fondazione Prada, Milan; Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria; and Kunstmuseum Basel. His current academic affiliations with the University of Chicago; the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; and Colby College, Waterville, Maine, aid the evolution of earlier vocational pursuits in public service, urban planning, and religious studies.
Gates was born in Chicago, where he continues to live and work. Public collections include Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles. Solo exhibitions include An Epitaph for Civil Rights, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2011–12); The Listening Room, Seattle Art Museum (2011–12); Soul Manufacturing Corporation: To Make the Thing that Makes the Things, Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia (2013); Processions, Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (2016); True Value, Fondazione Prada, Milan (2016); Black Archive, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2016); How to Build a House Museum, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2016); The Minor Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2017); and Black Madonna, Kunstmuseum Basel (2018, traveling to Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany).
#TheasterGates
Website

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Winter 2019
The Winter 2019 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring a selection from Christopher Wool’s Westtexaspsychosculpture series on its cover.

The Studio Museum in Harlem
Established in 1968, the Studio Museum in Harlem has served as a crucial institution in the development, presentation, and promotion of artists of African descent. With the museum now preparing for the construction of a new home, Gagosian’s Mark Francis spoke with Thelma Golden, director and chief curator, and Sir David Adjaye OBE, the project’s principal architect, about the building plans and the centrality of artists in their collaboration.

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2019
The Summer 2019 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring a detail from Afrylic by Ellen Gallagher on its cover.
Behind the Art
Theaster Gates: Slate Wall Drawing
Theaster Gates’s exhibition Amalgam at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, features some of the artist’s slate wall drawings. Watch as Gates creates one of these works in this time-lapse video, featuring music by Theaster Gates and the Black Monks.

(RED) Auction 2018
Theaster Gates and Sir David Adjaye join Bono to spearhead (RED)’s third auction of contemporary art and design, raising funds for the global fight against AIDS. As Gagosian prepares the preview exhibition, Gillian Pistell looks at the urgency of this vital cause.
Fairs, Events & Announcements

Art Fair
Art Basel Miami Beach 2019
December 5–8, 2019, booth D7
Miami Beach Convention Center
www.artbasel.com
Gagosian is pleased to participate in Art Basel Miami Beach 2019 with modern and contemporary artworks by Richard Avedon, Georg Baselitz, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Joe Bradley, Cecily Brown, John Chamberlain, John Currin, Edmund de Waal, Rachel Feinstein, Urs Fischer, Helen Frankenthaler, Ellen Gallagher, Theaster Gates, Katharina Grosse, Mark Grotjahn, Jennifer Guidi, Simon Hantaï, Damien Hirst, Alex Israel and Bret Easton Ellis, Ellsworth Kelly, Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein, Man Ray, Peter Marino, Adam McEwen, Joan Mitchell, Takashi Murakami, Albert Oehlen, Steven Parrino, Pablo Picasso, Rudolf Polanszky, Richard Prince, Sterling Ruby, Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, Rudolf Stingel, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, Mary Weatherford, Tom Wesselmann, Jonas Wood, Christopher Wool, and Zao Wou-Ki, among others.
To receive a PDF with detailed information on the works, please contact the gallery at inquire@gagosian.com. To attend the fair, purchase tickets at www.artbasel.com.
Download the full press release (PDF)
Tom Wesselmann, Sunset Nude with Wesselmann Still Life, 2004 © The Estate of Tom Wesselmann/Licensed by ARS/VAGA, New York

Exhibition
The Extreme Present
Opening reception: Tuesday, December 3, 5–8pm
December 4–8, 2019
Moore Building, Miami
Gagosian is pleased to announce The Extreme Present, the fifth in a series of annual exhibitions at the Moore Building in the Miami Design District during Art Basel Miami Beach, presented by Gagosian and Jeffrey Deitch. The Extreme Present will explore artists’ reactions to the conditions of our accelerating and increasingly complex world. The title is inspired by The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present, a book by Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, published in 2015. Their provocative thesis addresses the rapidly evolving digital era, half a century after Marshall McLuhan’s groundbreaking study on technology’s influence on culture, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, in which he coined the phrase “the medium is the message.” Works in this exhibition explore concepts of media, communication, togetherness, and isolation.
Download the full press release (PDF)
The Extreme Present

In Conversation
Theaster Gates, Grace Wales Bonner, and Michael Ralph
Thursday, December 12, 2019, 4:30–6:30pm
Museum of Liverpool, England
www.tate.org.uk
On the occasion of Theaster Gates: Amalgam, opening on December 13 at Tate Liverpool, England, the artist will speak with fashion designer Grace Wales Bonner and Michael Ralph, associate professor and director of Africana studies at New York University. The trio will discuss how Gates’s art transforms places and aims to improve the lives of the people who live there. The artist will also share his thoughts about his ongoing artistic endeavors on questions of land ownership, displacement, and interracial relationships. The event has reached capacity.
Theaster Gates with his work So Bitter, This Curse of Darkness (2019) in the exhibition Theaster Gates: Amalgam at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2019. Artwork © Theaster Gates. Photo: © Palais de Tokyo, Paris
Museum Exhibitions

Opening this Week
Theaster Gates
Amalgam
December 13, 2019–May 3, 2020
Tate Liverpool, England
www.tate.org.uk
In Amalgam Theaster Gates explores social histories of migration and interracial relations by focusing on a specific episode in the American narrative—a situation of black subjugation and the imperial domination and racial mixing that resulted from it. The artist’s interest in this phenomenon has given rise to new sculptural, architectural, filmic, and musical perspectives in his oeuvre as he critically examines the history of land ownership and race relations in the northeastern United States. This show has traveled from the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.
Installation view, Theaster Gates: Amalgam, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, February 20–May 12, 2019. Artwork © Theaster Gates. Photo: Chris Strong

On View
Theaster Gates in
. . . and other such stories
Through January 5, 2020
Chicago Architecture Biennial 2019
chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org
The third edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial invites practitioners and the public to engage with architecture and the built environment as prisms through which to reflect upon social, geopolitical, and ecological processes that affect our collective past, present, and future. Work by Theaster Gates is included.
Theaster Gates’s Dorchester Projects (2006–), Chicago. Artwork © Theaster Gates. Photo: Sara Pooley

On View
Mask
In Present-Day Art
Through January 5, 2020
Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, Switzerland
www.aargauerkunsthaus.ch
This exhibition explores how the subject of the mask is being addressed in contemporary art. Interest in masks among contemporary artists focuses not just on the mask as an object but also, and in particular, on its social, cultural, and political implications. Work by Theaster Gates, Douglas Gordon, and Cindy Sherman is included.
Douglas Gordon, Monster, 1996–97 © Studio lost but found/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019

On View
Theaster Gates
Assembly Hall
Through January 12, 2020
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
walkerart.org
Taking things that have been cast aside from libraries, archives, and collections, Theaster Gates asks us to consider what it means to invest objects with new meanings through the simple acts of conservation and care. This exhibition brings a number of Gates’s collections into a museum context for the first time. The Walker’s galleries transpose the artist’s vast collections and studio environment into four immersive rooms, each infused with his own poetic intervention.
Theaster Gates, Stony Island Arts Bank, 2012– © Theaster Gates. Photo: Tom Harris