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Artist Spotlight

Theaster Gates

June 10–16, 2020

Theaster Gates’s practice traverses an extraordinary range, from collecting to social gathering, architecture and object making, experimental music and sound, and the ethical and physical reconstruction of civic life. His interdisciplinary fusion of archiving, performance, institution building, painting, and sculpting is deeply rooted in African American histories and cultures, and revolves around the transformation of objects, edifices, and communities through art and cultural activity.

Created in response to the covid-19 pandemic, the Artist Spotlight series highlights individual artists, one week at a time, whose exhibitions have been affected by the health crisis. A single artwork by the artist is made available with pricing information for forty-eight hours only. 

Artist Spotlight: Theaster Gates will feature a new work directly from the artist’s studio. For more information, please contact the gallery at collecting@gagosian.com.

Photo: Chris Strong

Photo: Chris Strong

The inside of Theaster Gates’s Black Vessel for a Saint sculpture

How to Renew the Color of Bricks

Social historian Chris Dingwall reflects on Theaster Gates’s engagement with the history of quotidian materials, focusing on the symbolic qualities and function of his brick-based sculpture.

Theaster Gates in his studio

Theaster Gates: Black Vessel

Join Theaster Gates in his studio as he prepares for an upcoming exhibition at Gagosian, New York. In this video, shot on location in Chicago during the tumultuous weeks of protest in late spring 2020, Gates reflects on the metaphorical power of materials and process, and on the redemptive potential of art.

Photograph of Serpertine Pavilion designed by Theaster Gates © Theaster Gates Studio. Photo: Iwan Baan, courtesy: Serpentine

Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Questionnaire: Theaster Gates

In this ongoing series, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has devised a set of thirty-seven questions that invite artists, authors, musicians, and other visionaries to address key elements of their lives and creative practices. Respondents are invited to make a selection from the larger questionnaire and to reply in as many or as few words as they desire. For this installment, we are honored to present the artist Theaster Gates, whose Serpentine Pavilion 2022 Black Chapel opened in London on June 10.

Takashi Murakami cover and Andreas Gursky cover for Gagosian Quarterly, Summer 2022 magazine

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2022

The Summer 2022 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, with two different covers—featuring Takashi Murakami’s 108 Bonnō MURAKAMI.FLOWERS (2022) and Andreas Gursky’s V & R II (2022).

Theaster Gates, A Song for Frankie, 2017–21, 5,000 records, DJ booth, and record player

Social Works: The Archives of Frankie Knuckles Organized by Theaster Gates

Theaster Gates, steward of the Frankie Knuckles record collection, is engaging with the late DJ and musician’s archive of records, ephemera, and personal effects. For the Quarterly’s “Social Works” supplement, guest edited by Antwaun Sargent, Gates presents a selection of Knuckles’s personal record collection. Chantala Kommanivanh, a Chicago-based artist, educator, and musician—and the records manager for Rebuild Foundation, Chicago—provides annotations, contextualizing these records’ importance and unique qualities. Ron Trent, a dear friend of Knuckles’s, speaks to the legacy evinced by these materials.

Edmund de Waal and Theaster Gates

Artist to Artist: Edmund de Waal and Theaster Gates

Join the artists for an extended conversation about their most recent exhibitions, their forebears in the world of ceramics, and the key role that history plays in their practices.

Related News

Theaster Gates at his studio in Chicago, 2020. Photo: Lyndon French

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

Theaster Gates, Altar for the Unbanned, 2023, installation view, Harold Washington Library Center, Chicago Public Library © Theaster Gates

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

Theaster Gates, Temple Exercises, 2009 © Theaster Gates. Photo: Sara Pooley, courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

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

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Museum Exhibitions

Theaster Gates, The Flood, 2023, installation view, Fondazione Prada, Venice © Theaster Gates. Photo: Marco Cappelletti

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Theaster Gates in
Everybody Talks about the Weather

May 20–November 26, 2023
Fondazione Prada, Venice
www.fondazioneprada.org

Everybody Talks about the Weather is a research exhibition exploring the semantics of “weather” in visual art, taking atmospheric conditions as its point of departure in order to highlight the urgency of climate change. More than fifty works by contemporary artists, and a complementary selection of historical artworks, trace the various ways in which climate and weather have shaped our histories, and how we have dealt with our exposure to meteorological events. Work by Theaster Gates is included.

Theaster Gates, The Flood, 2023, installation view, Fondazione Prada, Venice © Theaster Gates. Photo: Marco Cappelletti

Installation view, Icônes, Punta della Dogana, Venice, April 2–November 26, 2023. Artwork, left and right: © Rudolf Stingel, center: © Danh Vo. Photo: Marco Cappelletti, courtesy Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection

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Icônes

April 2–November 26, 2023
Punta della Dogana, Venice
www.pinaultcollection.com

Icônes includes painting, video, sound, installation, and performance from the Pinault Collection. The icons of the title suggest a transcendent reality—the power to render material the invisible, create emotion or a sense of aesthetic and spiritual bedazzlement. This exhibition considers both the fragility and the power of images as icons and the multiple meanings they carry. Work by Theaster Gates, Donald Judd, and Rudolf Stingel is included.

Installation view, Icônes, Punta della Dogana, Venice, April 2–November 26, 2023. Artwork, left and right: © Rudolf Stingel, center: © Danh Vo. Photo: Marco Cappelletti, courtesy Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection

Sally Mann, Candy Cigarette, 1989 © Sally Mann 

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No Place Like Home

January 31–April 28, 2023
Schingoethe Center, Aurora University, Illinois
aurora.edu

No Place Like Home features artworks by more than thirty artists who address the concept of home from multiple perspectives. The exhibition features photography, sculpture, video, paintings, textiles, and printmaking and explores the many facets of home as a place of joy and sorrow, rest and labor, refuge and danger. Work by Theaster Gates and Sally Mann is included.

Sally Mann, Candy Cigarette, 1989 © Sally Mann 

Tatiana Trouvé, Untitled, 2019, from the series Les dessouvenus, 2013– © Tatiana Trouvé. Photo: Florian Kleinefenn

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Traces

July 30, 2022–April 23, 2023
Portland Art Museum, Oregon
portlandartmuseum.org

Traces presents poetic reflections on memory in contemporary art and features recent acquisitions alongside works borrowed from private collections. The exhibition showcases seven international artists who evocatively capture the traces of events, people, or places as remembrances of real experiences or projections of imagined ones. Work by Theaster Gates and Tatiana Trouvé is included.

Tatiana Trouvé, Untitled, 2019, from the series Les dessouvenus, 2013– © Tatiana Trouvé. Photo: Florian Kleinefenn

See all Museum Exhibitions for Theaster Gates