Theaster Gates

This publication accompanies a major new Theaster Gates exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, focusing on his clay-based work.
The transformation of clay—from geological substance into utilitarian and artistic material—is the basis for much of Gates' art and a powerful metaphor for his socially engaged work. Using his hands and his imagination, Gates reworks and revitalizes found objects, musical traditions, archive and library holdings and derelict buildings, giving them new form, meaning and purpose.
Fully illustrated with examples of pottery, sculptures, installations, films and archive materials, the book also documents a new film by Gates and features essays from leading craft historians and writers. This in-depth exploration of Gates' work is especially timely as a new generation seeks to synthesize making, identity and activism.
Theaster Gates (born 1973) lives and works in Chicago, and is a professor at the University of Chicago. He has had solo shows at Gagosian (2020) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2013). His work can be found in public collections worldwide, including the Menil Collection, Houston; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; the National Gallery of Canada, Ontario; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Tate, London; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

This book features essays and other reflections commissioned in response to the Facsimile Cabinet of Women Origin Stories, a monumental participatory work by Theaster Gates (born 1973). The Cabinet includes nearly 3,000 framed images of women from the Johnson Publishing Company archive, and highlights from the collection appear in this edited volume.
Founded in 1942, Chicago-based Johnson Publishing chronicled the lives of Black Americans for more than seven decades through the magazines Ebony and Jet. Composed from arguably the most important archive of American Black visual culture in the 20th century, Gates’ work centers the essential and too often unsung role of women in this history.
When the Cabinet was exhibited at the Colby College Museum of Art, 12 women from a wide range of disciplines (including archivists, legal scholars, anthropologists and librarians, as well as curators, visual artists, filmmakers, writers and art historians) were invited to reflect on a work that brings a sisterhood of images to light.

Guided by the forms of solidarity found within Black communities, American artist Theaster Gates (born 1973) creates visionary installations that transform public spaces into places of artistic and cultural intervention. In Black Chapel, Gates explores recent German and American history through the life of the great African American athlete Jesse Owens. In this expansive exhibition, Gates responds directly to the architecture of Haus der Kunst’s massive Middle Hall, exposing it to a complex and politically charged narrative. Alongside Owens’ complete and fully illustrated record collection being made available for the first time, the exhibition consists of several large pavilions containing sculptures, photographs and documents, as well as huge illuminated rotating panels displaying photographs from the archives of Ebony and Jet, two magazines that contributed significantly to the dissemination of Black culture in the United States. This interplay of sculpture and photography interrogates Black history, spirituality and representation, and recasts them visually.

In Every Square Needs a Circle, Theaster Gates (born 1973) offers a rumination on Black economies and empire building, relating to moments from art history and stories of quotidian labor. Produced on the occasion of his first exhibition in his native Chicago in over five years, Every Square Needs a Circle offers a detailed look at the artist’s sculpture, tar paintings, installation and neon work. Gates debuts a multifaceted installation that bridges the work of W.E.B. Du Bois with architectural excerpts from Chicago, placing his interest in the history of objects while expounding on the archives that hold records of Black intelligence.

The book features an introductory poem by Theaster Gates, an essay by Chicago artist Zachary Cahill and 112 color illustrations.

For his Kuntsmuseum Basel exhibition, Chicago-based multiartist Theaster Gates (born 1973) interrogates the mainstream art world’s Eurocentrism through a multi-venue, multimedia exploration of the figure of the Black Madonna.

A self-described “collector of collections,” Gates draws upon his vast arsenal of interdisciplinary talents and personal archives to highlight the Black Madonna’s presence in religion and art history. Including a printing workshop and performances by the artist’s band, the Black Monks, this many-faceted program is as much a site of creation and conversation as it is one of critical engagement.

This clothbound publication serves as an accompaniment to the exhibition and delves into Gates’ methods, featuring pictorial reportage and new essays that highlight a number of complexities related to spirituality, Black identity, and artistic and political agency.