Knows-no-bounds art star Theaster Gates returns to the studio for a debut exhibition with his new U.S. gallery

Text by Stephen Wallis

Posted December 12, 2016

http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/theaster-gates-chicago-new-exhibition

Where to begin talking about Theaster Gates, one of today’s most talked-about artists? For starters, calling him an artist is too narrow. Trained in pottery and urban planning, the Chicago-based dynamo is an activist, archivist, educator, facilitator, and maker, whose socially engaged practice ranges from sculptures, paintings, installations, and performances to adaptive-reuse projects. And in his richly complex world, everything is connected. “It could be a table or a sculpture or a renovated building,” he says. “Each one of those satisfies the same impulse in me and the same set of values.”

The diversity of Gates’s work is obvious upon stepping inside his sprawling studio, a former Anheuser-Busch warehouse on Chicago’s South Side. There’s a woodshop piled high with salvaged boards, a ceramics atelier littered with pots, and a storage area displaying pieces in progress, including bronze and stoneware elements for sculptures inspired by African masks and totems. “Those are things that have been on my mind for the last three years,” Gates says, “while other, larger projects were kind of casting a shadow on the quieter work.”

For nearly a decade, Gates, who grew up on the city’s West Side, has dedicated himself to reviving neglected properties throughout the South Side’s Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood and reactivating them with cultural programs. In 2011 he launched the nonprofit Rebuild Foundation to oversee his expanding initiatives, the most ambitious of which is the Stony Island Arts Bank, a long-abandoned 1923 building he bought from the city for a dollar, rehabilitated, and opened as a library, archive, and arts center just over a year ago. “I’m trying to work toward the creation of a cultural infrastructure, whereby the talented people of our city have more platforms to show the world what Chicago births,” he says.

Lately, Gates has been shifting more focus to his studio and making new work, a selection of which will be on view from January 14 through February 25 at Regen Projects, the Los Angeles gallery that now represents him in the U.S. Frequently incorporating cast-off objects and materials salvaged from building projects, Gates’s sculptures and installations are embedded with memory and history. Among his best-known artworks are tapestries crafted with strips of decommissioned fire hoses, evoking Civil Rights–era protests while also resonating with today’s challenging discussions about racial justice. Other works utilize old floorboards from gymnasiums, architectural fragments from a demolished church, remnants of shuttered shops—all symbolic reminders of the South Side’s past.

For Gates, the emphasis is on regeneration and restoring value. “I just love the part of the work that has to do with exhuming in order to help something live again, raising a thing up,” he says. His reference points can be deeply personal. Take his paintings made with roofing tar, which are both a literal, material exploration of blackness and an allusion to his father’s work as a roofer. And his experimental music ensemble, the Black Monks of Mississippi, can trace its roots directly to Gates’s involvement with a gospel choir.

In addition to the show at Regen Projects, Gates is preparing an exhibition that opens in March at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., as well as finalizing plans for his first permanent outdoor commission, slated to be unveiled at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden this summer. And while he’s hardly turning away from his community efforts with Rebuild, he’s relishing his time in the studio, working with his hands and having complete control over the process. “I want to be able to write a story that doesn’t require as many authors, so whatever ends up in the gallery space is what I decide will be there,” Gates says. “In a way, I’m back to the beginning.”