Theaster Gates

Theaster Gates (born August 28, 1973) is an American social practice installation artist and a professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago.

He was born in Chicago, Illinois, where he still lives and works.

Gates' work has been shown at major museums and galleries internationally and deals with urban planning, religious space, and craft.

He works to revitalize underserved neighborhoods by combining urban planning and art practices.

In Gates' words, "As the story went, [Yamaguchi] and his wife died in a car accident in 1991 and their son founded the Yamaguchi Institute to continue their vision of social transformation. I made ceramic plates, videotaped highly curated dinners and found a space for an exhibition of the ceramics and video. We gave a huge Japanese soul-food dinner, made by a Japanese chef and my sister, in honor of the Yamaguchis and their dinners. A young mixed-race artist enacted the role of their son and thanked everyone for coming."

In 1996, Gates graduated from Iowa State University with a B.S. in urban planning and ceramics.

After college, he worked primarily in ceramics and spent a year in Tokoname, Japan, studying pottery.

He decided he wanted to explore religion in South Africa, and in 1998 he received an M.A. degree at the University of Cape Town in fine arts and religious studies.

Gates' early work centered on his training as a ceramicist and study of comparative religions, and "many of his early projects addressed the shared significance of pottery in Japanese and African-American cultures."

Gates' art practice responds to disinvestment in African-American urban communities, particularly in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007–2008, addresses the importance of formal archives for remembering and valuing Black cultural forms, and disrupts artistic canons, especially those of post-painterly abstraction and color field painting.

Theaster Gates was born and raised in East Garfield Park on the West Side of Chicago.

He was the youngest of nine children and the only son.

His father was a roofer, and his mother a school teacher.

His sisters passed on their interest in civil rights activism, and the family attended a Baptist church where Gates, a choir member, became interested in performance.

Gates attended Lane Technical High School.

In 2007, Gates organized a conceptual exhibition at the Hyde Park Art Center titled Plate Convergence in which he staged a fictional event as an elaborate backstory for ceramic plates he had made.

The fiction involved Shoji Yamaguchi, a Japanese-born potter who had emigrated to the United States after WWII and took up residence in Mississippi, where he married a local black woman and civil rights activist and designed a plate especially suitable for the cuisine of black people.

The plate became a centerpiece of dinner parties and salons for discussing art and politics.

In 2008, Gates created his second fictional institution, with the exhibition "Tea Shacks, Collard Greens and the Preservation of Soul" at a temporary gallery space in Chicago that Gates dubbed the Center for the Proliferation of Afro-Asian Artifacts.

In 2010, Gates created an exhibition responding to and centering around the work of David Drake, titled Theaster Gates: To Speculate Darkly, at the Milwaukee Art Museum.

In this exhibition Gates used Drake's work to address issues of craft and race in African American history.

Gates is the founder and artist director of the Rebuild Foundation, a non-profit organization focused on cultural-driven redevelopment and affordable space initiatives in under-resourced communities.

Under Gates' leadership, the Rebuild Foundation currently manages projects in the Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood of Chicago.

Rebuild gained 501(c)(3) status in December 2010.

Program sites include the Stony Island Arts Bank, the Black Cinema House, the Dorchester Art + Housing Collaborative, Archive House, and Listening House.

For the Dorchester Projects, Gates restored and converted vacant buildings into cultural institutions with archival collections from the South Side.

Gates's Rebuild Foundation has renovated two houses on Dorchester Avenue, now called the Archive House and the Listening House.

The Archive House holds 14,000 architecture books from a closed bookshop.

The Listening House holds 8,000 records purchased at the closing of Dr. Wax Records.

Many of his works incorporate archived objects imbued with histories of racism, like his extensive series of works made with decommissioned firehoses, including In Case of Race Riot Break the Glass (2011) and the Civil Tapestry series (2011-ongoing).

The use of the hoses gestures to the extensive history of police departments using firehoses to attack protesters during the Civil Rights Movement.

In 2013, Gates purchased the Stony Island State Savings Bank from the city of Chicago.

The bank, now known as the Stony Island Arts Bank, contains the book collection of John H. Johnson, founder of Ebony and Jet magazines; the record collection of Frankie Knuckles, the godfather of house music; and slides of the collections of the University of Chicago and the Art Institute of Chicago.

In 2015, his Stony Island work was included in the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial.

The physical location of the Bank has also allowed Gates to host temporary exhibitions of artists, such as Glenn Ligon.

By working with archival collections centered in African-American history, Gates' work addresses issues of history, memory, and the value ascribed to Black history and cultural production.

He cites the influence on his own work of, for example, the Chicago ceramicist Marva Lee Pitchford-Jolly.

His 2017 piece "plantation lullabies" involved 4,000 pieces of what Gates describes as "negrobilia."

This included: old sheet music, signs, pamphlets, coin banks, figurines - as part of the Edward Williams Collection.

Similarly, his Black Image Corporation involved the use of John H. Johnson's photographic archive - with special focus being given to Black image-makers who were prominent during the civil rights era - Moneta Sleet, Jr and Isaac Sutton.