Theaster Gates

Untitled- Southside Wall Sculpture (Chicago) by Theaster Gates

circa 2001

The work of Theaster Gates (b. 1973) extends beyond museums and galleries to reclaimed buildings and whole city blocks. Approaching his work as both an urban planner and an artist, Gates’s multifaceted career has involved community projects, installations, performances with his musical ensemble the Black Monks and sculpture. Initially focused on ceramics, he has used that experience of shaping material into something new in his social-practice-oriented art.

Alongside art engaging with Black history in the United States — such as his Civil Tapestry series (2011) in which layered fire hoses evoke abstract paintings as well as the police’s use of hoses on civil rights activists — Gates has spearheaded initiatives to revitalize his hometown of Chicago. In 2010, in response to the many structures that have over time become abandoned in his South Side neighborhood, Gates launched the Rebuild Foundation. The project has seen the renovation of a number of buildings, with one being transformed into a gallery space.

After earning a bachelor’s in urban planning at Iowa State University and later pursuing religious studies at the University of Cape Town, Gates studied pottery with ceramics masters in Japan. He returned to the United States to finish multidisciplinary master’s work in urban planning, ceramics and religious studies. Gates brings these areas and his civic-minded projects together in pieces such as 2007’s Plate Convergence, for which he made 50 plank-shaped clay plates. For the exhibition’s installation, the plates were hung on a wall at Chicago’s Hyde Park Art Center paired with a projection of a pre-filmed dinner featuring the tableware, which referenced the history of the plates and the “unexpected relationships” that emerged around them. 

Gates’s art regularly elevates underappreciated materials, including roofer’s tar and beetle-damaged ash trees that were made into pillars for his 2019 solo show at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. A sense of place and the vitality of these objects is always central, such as Martyr Construction, his exhibition at the 2015 Venice Biennale. The work featured elements of a demolished Chicago church, a reflection on the civic failures to preserve sacred architecture in marginalized neighborhoods.

Find Theaster Gates’s art on 1stDibs.