In Conversation
Big Ideas
Theaster Gates with Magdalene Odundo and Lydia Yee
Thursday, November 11, 2021, 2pm est (7pm BST)
As part of Ways of Knowing: Earth/Matter, an online series of artist talks organized by the Whitechapel Gallery in London, Theaster Gates will be joined by artist Dame Magdalene Odundo DBE and Whitechapel chief curator Lydia Yee to discuss his current exhibition, A Clay Sermon, on view at the gallery through January 9, 2022. The trio will speak about how Gates’s transformation of clay—from geological substance into utilitarian and artistic material—stands as a powerful metaphor for his socially engaged work and wider artistic practice. To join the online event, visit buy.myonlinebooking.co.uk.
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Installation view, Theaster Gates: A Clay Sermon, Whitechapel Gallery, London, September 29–January 9, 2022. Artwork © Theaster Gates. Photo: Theo Christelis
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Art Fair
Frieze Los Angeles 2024
Social Abstraction
March 1–3, 2024, booth D13
Santa Monica Airport, California
frieze.com
Gagosian is pleased to announce its participation in Frieze Los Angeles 2024 with Social Abstraction, a diverse selection of paintings and sculptures rooted in the exploration of historic qualities of abstraction and contemporary social realities. The first in a sequence of three presentations organized by Antwaun Sargent, Social Abstraction at Frieze Los Angeles will be followed by exhibitions in Beverly Hills this summer and in Hong Kong this fall.
The intergenerational group of Black artists in Social Abstraction—Derrick Adams, Theaster Gates, Cy Gavin, Lauren Halsey, and Rick Lowe—operates beyond purely formal concerns to create artworks that move between and beyond figuration and abstraction. They push shape to become landscape, color to reveal people, and texture to map the totality of experience.
Gagosian’s booth at Frieze Los Angeles 2024. Artwork, front to back: © Lauren Halsey, © Cy Gavin, © Theaster Gates. Photo: Ed Mumford
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
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