News / Theaster Gates / Museum Exhibitions

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Ubuntu
The Harry David Art Collection

September 19, 2020–March 18, 2021
National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens
www.emst.gr

The South African term ubuntu refers to notions of community and a spirit of sharing. As the inaugural exhibition of works from the Harry David Art Collection—which showcases leading artists active in Africa and the diaspora as well as African American artists—Ubuntu introduces five distinct curatorial viewpoints unfolding across five specially designed rooms. Each presents a personal selection of works from the collection chosen by one of five different artists and curators. In this way, the collection functions as a resource that is open to interpretation, with each space enabling artworks to be encountered as a series of unique conversations. Work by Ellen Gallagher, Theaster Gates, Romauld Hazoumè, and Meleko Mokgosi is included.

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Theaster Gates
The Black Image Corporation

January 28–December 5, 2020
Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta
www.spelman.edu

As an ongoing concern, Theaster Gates’s Black Image Archive examines the legacy of the Johnson Publishing Company archive, which contains more than four million images and helped shape the aesthetic and cultural vision of modern African American identity. Founded by John H. Johnson in 1942, the company created Ebony and Jet, two key periodicals for Black American audiences. Gates’s participatory exhibition invites visitors to actively explore the archive, which includes images by Moneta Sleet Jr. and Isaac Sutton, among many others.

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Theaster Gates
Black Chapel

October 25, 2019–August 16, 2020
Haus der Kunst, Munich
hausderkunst.de

For the sixth iteration of Haus der Kunst’s Der Öffentlichkeit commission series, Theaster Gates has created the expansive Black Chapel. This multipartite installation directly responds to the architecture of Haus der Kunst’s Middle Hall, exposing it to a complex politically and spiritually charged narrative while rendering it as an inviting social space. Two large pavilions, as well as vitrines, contain sculptures, photographs, and documents. Rotating mirrored sculptures and illuminated panels displaying photographs from the landmark Johnson Publishing Company further animate the space.

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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 concerning the forced eviction of Black and mixed-race residents from the island of Malaga off the coast of Maine. The artist’s interest in this historical event 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.

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Theaster Gates
Assembly Hall

September 5, 2019–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.

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Theaster Gates in
Chicago Architecture Biennial 2019: . . . and other such stories

September 19, 2019–January 5, 2020
Chicago Architecture Biennial 2019
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.

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Mask
In Present-Day Art

September 1, 2019–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.

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La source

April 13–November 3, 2019
Fondation Carmignac, Porquerolles, France
www.fondationcarmignac.com

Visitors are invited to take off their shoes before descending beneath the surface of the Provençal farmhouse where the exhibition is staged to discover more than sixty artworks from the collection, as well as important loans and new productions. Work by Theaster Gates and Roy Lichtenstein is included.

June 23–September 22, 2019
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
www.mfah.org

The exhibition surveys the gradual recognition of fashion photography as an art form through more than two hundred photographs and presents a broad and diverse perspective on the art form and its trajectory from niche industry to powerful cultural force. Work by Theaster Gates is included.

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Theaster Gates
Facsimile Cabinet of Women Origin Stories

March 12–September 8, 2019
Colby Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine
www.colby.edu

This exhibition features nearly three thousand images from the Johnson Publishing Company archive, which since 1942 has chronicled the lives of black Americans through the magazines Ebony and Jet. Theaster Gates’s project, composed from this important archive of black visual culture, recontextualizes and reanimates these images and their histories, as Facsimile Cabinet is both a repository and an interactive archive.

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The Black Image Corporation

April 25–July 28, 2019
Gropius Bau, Berlin
www.berlinerfestspiele.de

Conceived by Theaster Gates, this exhibition looks at the legacy of the Johnson Publishing Company archive, which features more than four million images and has helped shape the aesthetic and cultural languages of the contemporary African American identity. Founded by John H. Johnson in 1942, the company created Ebony and Jet, two of the landmark publications for black American audiences. The participatory exhibition focuses on the works of Moneta Sleet Jr. and Isaac Sutton, two photographers whose works are in the collection. This exhibition has traveled from the Fondazione Prada in Milan.

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Theaster Gates
Amalgam

February 20–May 12, 2019
Palais de Tokyo, Paris
www.palaisdetokyo.com

For his first solo museum exhibition in France, 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.

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The Black Image Corporation

September 20, 2018–January 14, 2019
Osservatorio Fondazione Prada, Milan
www.fondazioneprada.org

Conceived by Theaster Gates, this exhibition looks at the legacy of Johnson Publishing Company archive, which features more than four million images and has helped shape the aesthetic and cultural languages of the contemporary African American identity. Founded by John H. Johnson in 1942, the company created Ebony and Jet, two of the landmark publications for black American audiences. The participatory exhibition focuses on the works of Moneta Sleet Jr. and Isaac Sutton, two photographers whose works are in the collection.

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Theaster Gates
How to Build a House Museum

July 21–October 30, 2016
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto
ago.ca

Theaster Gates’s immersive exhibition, organized as a world of symbolic structures and their associated objects, explored the potential of house museums—historically important landmarks that have been transformed into legacy sites. Proposing new ways of honoring and remembering Black experience, Gates explored the potential of these spaces through music, dance, video, sculpture, and painting. The exhibition was dedicated to Black luminaries including George Black, Frankie Knuckles, and Muddy Waters. How to Build a House Museum invited visitors to tour the house museum in its many possible forms: as an architectural monument, a historical representation, or a site of freedom.

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Theaster Gates
True Value

July 7–September 25, 2016
Fondazione Prada, Milan
www.fondazioneprada.org

True Value, the first exhibition by Theaster Gates in Milan, brought together a selection of existing works and new commissions in two different spaces at Fondazione Prada. The Cisterna featured works in which the artist explored habitual, everyday things that are charged with and convey a deep understanding of the social histories in which they have been immersed. At the Podium, Gates presented True Value (2016), the installation after which the exhibition was named—his rendition of an abandoned hardware store. True Value gathers materials, objects, and tools removed from their original context and relocated in an art environment, deploying a framework to formulate a poetic and pragmatic space around objects of trade and the human relationships created through those economic and labor exchanges.

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56th Biennale di Venezia
All the World’s Futures

May 9–November 22, 2015
Giardini and Arsenale, Venice
www.labiennale.org

All the World’s Futures, curated by Okwui Enwezor for the 56th Biennale di Venezia, forms a unitary itinerary with over 136 artists from fifty-three countries, of whom eighty-nine are showing in the Biennale for the first time. The world before us today exhibits deep divisions and wounds, pronounced inequalities, and uncertainties as to the future. The exhibition aims to investigate how the tensions of the outside world act on the sensitivities and the vital and expressive energies of artists, on their desires and their inner songs. Work by Georg Baselitz, Ellen Gallagher, Theaster Gates, Katharina Grosse, Andreas Gursky, Carsten Höller, Tetsuya Ishida, and Taryn Simon is included.

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Theaster Gates in
Documenta 13

June 9–September 16, 2012
Various locations in Kassel, Germany
www.theastergates.com

This installation by Theaster Gates, made in an abandoned hotel in Kassel, Germany, on the occasion of Documenta 13, imagined the ambitious restoration of the hotel with labor and materials from an abandoned building on Chicago’s South Side. In addition to becoming a home for sculptural works, the three-story building also functioned as a platform for wellness, public conversations, ongoing musical performances by the Black Monks of Mississippi, and sleeping quarters for a team of skilled builders, artists, and other makers in training—all part of a larger project of service to community, and community in service to craft.