Theaster Gates — À propos — Slash Paris

Laureate of the Kurt Schwitters Prize in 2017 and participant in Documenta in Kassel in 2012, Theaster Gates has multiplied projects in recent years by anchoring his reflection around the themes of reconstruction, participation in a social life that he articulates around the history and identity of African Americans.

Urbanist and ceramist, Theaster Gates has been inventing hybrid events for fifteen years that engage different bodies and doctrines combining arts, social development and history, like one of his first exhibitions, Shoji Yamagauchi in 2007, at the Hyde Park Art Center in which he imagined the journey of a Japanese potter who immigrated to the United States and, having married a black woman activist for social rights there, designed a plate especially for the culinary traditions of his community. This fiction then served as the backbone of an installation that mixed sculptures, videos and performances around traditions and habits from his own journey, himself having followed part of his studies in Japan.

Multiplying sources of knowledge and accumulating diplomas, the Chicago native draws from his environment, from his history and from the history of his country the themes of his polymorphic works, just as he appropriates, in urban structures abandoned, the tools and materials presiding over the design of new constructions intended to be anchored in community sharing. Like its Rebuild Foundation, which has been committed for nearly seven years to rehabilitating disused buildings on the South Side of Chicago, a district neglected by the authorities to create cultural businesses there, in particular a place of exhibitions, and a house of Black Cinema, but also housing and artists’ studios.

But beyond the local dimension of his Rebuild Projects (monumental like his work in Chicago), Theaster Gates animates a reflection around the action, the act and the inscription of the artist in the heart of a system of powers, well intentioned or not, that it is up to him to penetrate in order to seize it and modify, in turn, our environment, both on the formal level and on the interactions that would ensue.

Text: Slash-Paris

Theaster Gates is also a professor at the University of Chicago in the Department of Visual Arts and the College, he serves as the Senior Advisor for Cultural Innovation and Advisor to the Dean, he is Director of Artists Initiatives at the Lunder Institute for American Art at Colby College Museum of Art and the 2018/2019 Artist-in-Residence at the Getty Research Institute (GRI).