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On View

Effetto Notte
Nuovo Realismo Americano

Through July 14, 2024
Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome
barberinicorsini.org

This exhibition’s title was borrowed from a work by Lorna Simpson, Day for Night (2018), which translates to Effetto Notte in Italian. Curated by Massimiliano Gioni and Flaminia Gennari Santori in collaboration with the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, the exhibition features more than 150 artworks from the collection of Tony and Elham Salamé that interrogate the meanings and functions of figuration in contemporary art and address questions around the notion of realism and the representation of truth in painting. Work by Derrick Adams, Louise Bonnet, Maurizio Cattelan, Urs Fischer, Theaster Gates, Duane Hanson, Rick Lowe, Richard Prince, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Sterling Ruby, Anna Weyant, Stanley Whitney, and Christopher Wool is included.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Theaster Gates
Young Lords and Their Traces

November 10, 2022–February 5, 2023
New Museum, New York
www.newmuseum.org

Theaster Gates: Young Lords and Their Traces presents a selection of the artist’s paintings, sculptures, videos, performances, and archival collections that together memorialize both heroic figures and more humble, everyday icons. Gates’s elevation of these quieter sources of knowledge, and his assertion that collecting is a form of devotion and remembrance, has made his work reverberate on both local and international levels. In this exhibition the Chicago-based artist honors the radical thinkers who have shaped his practice and his world.

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Theaster Gates in
A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration

October 30, 2022–January 29, 2023
Baltimore Museum of Art
artbma.org

A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration explores the profound impact of the Great Migration on the social and cultural life of the United States from historical and personal perspectives. The Great Migration (1915–70) saw more than six million Black Americans leave the South for cities across the country. The exhibition features newly commissioned works in a variety of media by twelve Black artists who explore themes of perseverance, self-determination, and self-reliance in their practices. Informed by research, explorations, and conversations, they examine the impacts this historical phenomenon continues to have today. This exhibition has traveled from the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson. Work by Theaster Gates is included.

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Monochrome Multitudes

September 22, 2022–January 8, 2023
Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago
smartmuseum.uchicago.edu

Revisiting classic modernist ideas about flatness, idealized form, and colors, this exhibition opens up the seemingly reductive format of the monochrome to reveal its global resonance and creative possibilities while working toward a more expansive narrative of twentieth and twenty-first century art. Work by Alexander Calder, Walter De Maria, Helen Frankenthaler, Theaster Gates, Frank Gehry, Sally Mann, and Richard Serra is included.

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Theaster Gates in
A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration

April 9–September 11, 2022
Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson
www.msmuseumart.org

A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration explores the profound impact of the Great Migration on the social and cultural life of the United States from historical and personal perspectives. The Great Migration (1915–70) saw more than six million Black Americans leave the South for cities across the country. The exhibition features newly commissioned works in a variety of media by twelve Black artists who explore themes of perseverance, self-determination, and self-reliance in their practices. Informed by research, explorations, and conversations, they examine the impacts this historical phenomenon continues to have today. Work by Theaster Gates is included.

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Theaster Gates in
Working Thought

March 5–June 26, 2022
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
cmoa.org

Working Thought examines the role that art can play in considering and questioning the myriad ways in which economic inequality and labor have shaped American life in the past and present. Featuring work by thirty-five contemporary artists working across mediums and generations, the exhibition presents new commissions and loans alongside works from the Carnegie Museum of Art’s collection, positioning its holdings in a new light and within the context of Pittsburgh’s history as a center of industry. Work by Theaster Gates is included.

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Theaster Gates in
Hawai‘i Triennial 2022: Pacific Century–E Ho‘omau No Moananuiākea

February 18–May 8, 2022
Various locations around Oahu, Hawaii
hawaiicontemporary.org

Hawai‘i Triennial 2022 is framed around interweaving themes of history, place, and identity within the context of Hawaiʻi’s unique location at the confluence of the Asia Pacific region and Oceania. Installed across seven of Oahu’s major cultural institutions, the triennial features the work of more than sixty artists from Hawaii and beyond. The event is organized by Hawai‘i Contemporary, a Honolulu-based nonprofit organization. Work by Theaster Gates is included.

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Theaster Gates
Vessels

February 4–April 30, 2022
Benaki Museum of Greek Culture, Athens
www.benaki.org

Vessels features a group of seven large-scale ceramic works by Theaster Gates in which the artist synthesizes ancient traditions and modern aesthetics, drawing elective affinities between Eastern, Western, and African techne. Gates’s consideration of the clay vessel as a universal object of ritual significance, which testifies to the primordial relationship between humankind and clay, is given full expression in the Benaki Museum galleries by virtue of comparison with ancient pottery from across the Eastern Mediterranean zone.

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Theaster Gates
A Clay Sermon

September 29, 2021–January 9, 2022
Whitechapel Gallery, London
www.whitechapelgallery.org

Surveying two decades of work by Theaster Gates, from his early hand-thrown pots to his large-scale Afro-Mingei sculptures, A Clay Sermon investigates the material and spiritual legacies of clay. Exploring craft, labor, performance, and racial identity, as well as clay’s role in ceremony, ritual, colonialism, and global trade, Gates has made a selection of historical ceramics from private and public collections to exhibit alongside his own work. The exhibition includes a new film by Gates, which takes the form of a sermon on clay, and his most recent body of work: large stoneware vessels installed on plinths of hand-milled wood and stone.

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Theaster Gates
Slight Intervention #5

September 18, 2021–January 9, 2022
Victoria & Albert Museum, London
www.vam.ac.uk

In this exhibition, Theaster Gates engages with histories of spirituality, Black music, craft, and modernism in two clay interventions. Using his skills as a potter, Gates communicates with makers across time and between cultures. The display includes a new vessel produced in response to American studio potter Peter Voulkos’s work and a vitrine containing objects made at Gates’s temporary workshop at the Istanbul Biennial.

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Aesthetics
Collection of Qiao Zhibing

March 19–December 19, 2021
Tank Shanghai
www.tankshanghai.com

Qiao Zhibing, contemporary art collector and founder of Tank Shanghai, has selected works from his private collection by twelve Chinese and international contemporary artists for this exhibition, which explores the inspiration art brings to the public from a visual perspective. Work by Theaster Gates and Thomas Houseago is included.

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Theaster Gates in
The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse

May 22–September 6, 2021
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond
www.vmfa.museum

The Dirty South investigates the aesthetic impulses of early twentieth-century Black culture that have become ubiquitous within the American South. The exhibition chronicles the sonic and visual parallels that have served to shape the contemporary landscape, and looks deeply into the frameworks of landscape, religion, and the Black body—deep meditative repositories of thought and expression. Within the visual arts, assemblage, collage, appropriation, and sonic transference are explored as deeply connected to musical traditions. Work by Theaster Gates is included.

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Field of Dreams

August 20, 2020–August 31, 2021
Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York
parrishart.org

Field of Dreams activates the Parrish Art Museum’s expansive meadows with sculpture by ten international, multigenerational artists that engages and responds to the museum’s architecture and landscape. Created to extend the galleries outdoors, the exhibition series is part of the Parrish’s new Art in the Meadow initiative that enlivens its 14-acre grounds with artworks, performances, and projections. Work by Theaster Gates, Roy Lichtenstein, and Giuseppe Penone is included.

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Theaster Gates
Bad Neon

March 19–August 29, 2021
Tank Shanghai
tankshanghai.com

In his exhibition Bad Neon, Theaster Gates transforms the unique space of Tank Shanghai—which is housed within decommissioned aviation fuel tanks of a former airport—into a roller-skating rink, complete with neon lights, music, and artworks. Visitors are invited to experience the energy of Gates’s art on skates, including two iceberg-shaped sculptures, Houseberg (gold) and Houseberg (silver), which pay tribute to 1980s Chicago house music and clubs. Over the course of the exhibition, musicians and artists will craft different genres of music, introducing more possibilities to the site.

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Theaster Gates in
Promise, Witness, Remembrance

April 7–June 6, 2021
Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky
www.promisewitnessremembrance.org

Promise, Witness, Remembrance reflects on the life of Breonna Taylor, her killing by Louisville police in 2020, and the year of protests that followed, both locally and around the world. The group exhibition explores the dualities of this personal, local story and the nation’s reflection on the promise, witness, and remembrance of too many Black lives lost to gun violence. Work by Theaster Gates is included.

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Grief and Grievance
Art and Mourning in America

February 17–June 6, 2021
New Museum, New York
www.newmuseum.org

Grief and Grievance, originally conceived by curator Okwui Enwezor (1963–2019), is an intergenerational exhibition, bringing together thirty-seven artists working in a variety of mediums who have addressed the concept of mourning, commemoration, and loss as a direct response to the national emergency of racist violence experienced by Black communities across America. The intertwined phenomena of Black grief and a politically orchestrated white grievance are further considered, as each structures and defines contemporary American social and political life. The exhibition comprises works encompassing video, painting, sculpture, installation, photography, sound, and performance made within the last decade, along with several key historical works and a series of new commissions created in response to the concept of the exhibition. Work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Ellen Gallagher, and Theaster Gates is included.

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Theaster Gates in
Lost and Looking

January 30–June 5, 2021
Lubeznik Center for the Arts, Michigan City, Indiana
www.lubeznikcenter.org

Considering how place and loss affect us all, the artists included in Lost and Looking confront the reality of our pasts and our futures. Places from our collective and personal histories help define who we are even as they remain fluid in our mind’s eyes. The exhibiting artists consistently explore how true or fictionalized memories can be, and how accurate or inaccurate recorded history truly is. The ever-shifting landscape, filled with false histories, be they personal or historical, drives these artists in their quest for higher meaning. Work by Theaster Gates is included.

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Theaster Gates
Breathing

November 7, 2020–May 31, 2021
Pérez Art Museum Miami
www.pamm.org

Theaster Gates’s Breathing (2010) is a video work inspired by the artist’s avid interest in Eastern Buddhism as well as his lifelong personal relationship with traditional gospel music, which constituted a formative aspect of his Baptist upbringing. The singers who appear in the video belong to an experimental choir known as the Black Monks (formerly the Black Monks of Mississippi), which Gates has directed since 2008. The Black Monks merge Black Southern gospel and blues music with the monastic chant traditions of Buddhism. The soothing, beautiful melodies that result from this unique hybrid testify to the potency of Black spiritual musical legacies while alluding to a communal experience that transcends geographic, cultural, and linguistic boundaries.

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Future Histories
Theaster Gates and Cauleen Smith

October 17, 2020–May 23, 2021
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
www.sfmoma.org

Bringing together the work of two interdisciplinary artists, this presentation centers on video projections that each take archival magazine photography as a departure point. Theaster Gates’s Do you hear me calling? Mama Mamama or What Is Black Power? (2018) pays homage to the power of women by exploring the idea of the Black Madonna through a reworking of three decades of images drawn from the archives of the Chicago-based Johnson Publishing Company, publisher of Jet and Ebony magazines. Smith’s Sojourner (2018) culminates with a feminist reimagining of an unpublished photograph taken for Life magazine in 1966.

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Theaster Gates
China Cabinet

March 11–May 7, 2021
Prada Rong Zhai, Shanghai
www.prada.com

Theaster Gates: China Cabinet explores the links that exist between Gates’s activity as a ceramist and his work as a visual artist, performer, professor, urban planner, and community activist. Organized with support of Fondazione Prada, the exhibition is conceived as a narrative in three chapters that unfolds across multiple staged settings in which the artist’s role evolves from guest to ghost to host. Following tableaux suggesting an antique Chinese porcelain boutique and a reconstruction of Gates’s potter’s workshop, the story culminates with the artist’s complete occupation of Prada Rong Zhai with artworks displayed as they would be in a private home.