News / Theaster Gates / Announcements

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’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 has been selected to receive the Isamu Noguchi Award for his contribution as an artist. Established in 2014 and presented annually, the award perpetuates Noguchi’s legacy by acknowledging highly accomplished individuals who share his spirit of innovation, unbounded imagination, and uncompromising commitment to creativity. Honoring those whose work exhibits qualities of artistic excellence, the award also recognizes work that carries significant social consciousness and function. Gates will receive the award during the annual benefit gala at the Noguchi Museum, New York, in September 2023.

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.

Theaster Gates will be inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters during a virtual award ceremony on May 19, 2021. Founded in 1898, the organization honors the country’s leading visual artists, architects, composers, and writers, and seeks to foster interest in literature, music, and art by administering awards, exhibiting work, funding performances, and purchasing artwork for donation to museums. Election into the American Academy of Arts and Letters is considered the highest form of recognition of artistic merit in the United States, and its 300 members are elected for life.

The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis has permanently installed Theaster Gates’s Black Vessel for a Saint (2017) in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. In 2014, St. Laurence Church, located just a few blocks from Theaster Gates’s Chicago studio and considered an architectural beacon in the neighborhood for more than a century, was demolished. Among the objects and materials that Gates collected from the building was a life-size stone statue of St. Laurence, a venerated Roman martyr and the patron saint of librarians and archivists. Gates included the statue in several exhibitions in Europe, revealing new meanings in each location, before placing it in its permanent home in the Sculpture Garden in 2017, within a shrine built from custom-made black bricks.

Theaster Gates was selected as the second recipient of the Visions of the City artist grant in July 2019. Launched by the Obayashi Foundation in 2017, the program awards one research grant every two years to an artist with an abundance of creative ideas and a specific interest in urban development and renewal.

Theaster Gates was named Chevalier de l’Ordre national de la Légion d’honneur by the French Ambassador to the United States, Gérard Araud, in 2017. Reflecting the multifaceted contours of French society, the Légion d’honneur is the country’s highest order of merit. For two centuries, it has been presented on behalf of the Head of State to reward the most deserving citizens in all fields of activity.

Theaster Gates received the 2020 Crystal Award for his leadership in creating sustainable communities. Gates was awarded the prize at the January 2020 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, alongside choreographer Jin Xing, actor Deepika Padukon, and artist Lynette Wallworth. The annual award is bestowed to cultural leaders who reflect on the human condition and provide visions of the world that can cut through the limitations of short-term or linear thinking.

In April 2019, the Chicago Transit Authority unveiled two new works by Theaster Gates, commissioned for the recently completed 95th/Dan Ryan station, located at the southernmost end of the city’s Red Line. With america, america (2019), a pair of large tapestries made from decommissioned fire hoses, on display in the station’s South Terminal, the artist aims to formally materialize the history of the civil rights struggle in the US and to acknowledge that the work of equity and equality is an ongoing effort carried on not by one person but by all.

Gagosian is pleased to announce the representation of Theaster Gates. 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 both derives from and sustains ambitious urban renewal projects—creating hubs and archives for Black culture, which serve as catalysts for discussions on race, equality, space, and history. Aspects of Gates’s oeuvre suggest the almost shamanic role of worker and artisan, where the power of the unseen is harnessed and manifested in the ordinary and everyday. In his abstract compositions made out of new and used roofing materials—tar, rubber, slate—working-class labor, ritual, and formalism intersect and are imbued with religious potency.

Download the press release in English (PDF) or French (PDF)

Live auction: Wednesday, December 5, 2018
Online auction: November 12–December 7, 2018
Exhibition: December 1–7, 2018
Moore Building, Miami

Gagosian is pleased to announce the third (RED) Auction to support the fight against AIDS, organized in partnership with (RED) and Sotheby’s.

Bono, the driving force behind (RED), invited artist Theaster Gates and architect Sir David Adjaye to cocurate a selection of contemporary art and design that will be auctioned by Sotheby’s on December 5, 2018, during Art Basel in Miami Beach and Design Miami/ 2018. Gagosian will present a preview exhibition of the works at the famed Moore Building in Miami, which will open on World AIDS Day, December 1.

Artists donating works include Ai Weiwei, Christo, Rachel Feinstein, Teresita Fernández, Frank Gehry, Jennifer Guidi, Sir Jony Ive and Marc Newson, Jeff Koons, Guillermo Kuitca, Marilyn Minter, Wangechi Mutu, Jenny Saville, and Sean Scully; Adjaye and Gates will also contribute unique pieces.

Proceeds from this year’s auction will support community-based programs in Africa through the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, while also providing assistance to fight HIV through community-strengthening programs in Chicago with Theaster Gates’s Rebuild Foundation. For additional information, please contact Lidia Andich at redauction@gagosian.com.

View the auction catalogue (PDF)

In the third episode of The Making of the (RED) Auction video series, Bono, Sir David Adjaye and Theaster Gates discuss light, the theme of the auction this year.

The (RED) Auction, organized by Gagosian in partnership with (RED) and Sotheby’s, will be held in the Miami Design District during Art Basel in Miami Beach and Design Miami 2018. Find out more about the auction, lots, and preview exhibition.

In the first episode of The Making of the (RED) Auction video series, musician and activist Bono describes (RED)’s mission to end AIDS, and recalls the successes of the first auctions.

Organized by Gagosian in partnership with (RED) and Sotheby’s, the (RED) Auction will take place on December 5, 2018, during Art Basel in Miami Beach and Design Miami/ 2018. Find out more about the auction, lots, and preview exhibition.

In the second episode of The Making of the (RED) Auction video series, Theaster Gates and Sir David Adjaye discuss why they decided to join (RED)’s fight to end AIDS. 

The (RED) Auction, organized by Gagosian in partnership with (RED) and Sotheby’s, will be held in the Miami Design District during Art Basel in Miami Beach and Design Miami 2018. Find out more about the auction, lots, and preview exhibition.