Four weeks until the opening of his new exhibition, and the artist Theaster Gates is at the Smart Museum, on the University of Chicago campus, helping fabricators install a work that includes many parts and palimpsests.
The workers open enormous crates holding one of Gates’s collections of orphaned books — more than 2,500 volumes he obtained from a store in Cleveland that went out of business. Gates rebound all the books in jet-black covers and inscribed each replacement spine with a verse, the words emanating from the content inside. When placed side by side, the books form the entirety of a poem he composed, a reflection on his mother’s death more than a decade ago.
“She mama / With flesh,” Gates begins to mouth as he checks the spines, quickly losing himself in a full-throated invocation of his poetic imagination. “She was / Vorare / Eurasia aphasia amnesia / Is where we aaaaaat / Is where we at.”
Gates says he needs the books displayed along a wall not only in order but also tightly, dramatically, so that visitors to the museum might feel compelled to utter the words themselves, filling the gallery with a collective murmured prayer.
“I traffic in unwanted things,” he asserts, a trade over his career that has involved not only discarded books but also seemingly everything from old fire hoses to salvaged school desks and boarded-up buildings. “What I like is that the duress creates urgency. It creates a logistical challenge. It creates a spatial opportunity. And all of those things are like the engine fuel that ignite a kind of new creative energy.”
Gates rebound a collection of books in jet-black covers, and inscribed each replacement spine with a verse, the words emanating from the content inside. When placed side by side, the books form the entirety of a poem he composed, a reflection on his mother’s death more than a decade ago.
Manuel Martinez/WBEZ
Gates, who is 51, with heavy-lidded eyes and a white-fringed beard, is a commanding, incantatory presence. Since self-financing his first show at the Hyde Park Art Center in 2007, the West Side native has rocketed into an art world superstar, winning numerous awards, selling out gallery shows and headlining major museum exhibitions in New York and Japan.
Surprisingly, the exhibition this fall at the Smart, titled “Unto Thee,” is Gates’ first solo museum show in his hometown. For a local artist of his renown, whose fascinating and hard-to-pin-down practice includes investing in Black communities in Chicago, the exhibition represents a turning point as well in his relationship to both his craft and his city. A “pivot,” he calls it, “in what I need every day to feel fulfilled.”
In addition to working as a potter, painter, performer and sculptor, Gates has acquired numerous vacant properties in the South Side’s Grand Crossing neighborhood. As part of his art practice, he has revivified these buildings, repurposing them as places for gathering and performance, infusing them with art and artists and unwanted archives, turning them into models — or symbols — of redevelopment and hope. The nonprofit he created to manage and activate these holdings he named Rebuild.
After two decades of amassing here in Chicago, of bringing his wild dreams to life, of fame and its ensuing responsibilities, Gates is, with this new exhibition, simultaneously offering the city a window into his outsized portfolio and figuring out how to wind aspects of that practice down.
“In 20 years, whatever I was supposed to do, I did,” Gates says. “I feel very much like I don’t owe anybody anything as it relates to my contributions as a citizen of a place, or a citizen of an institution, or a citizen of my race.”
A roofer’s son with a vision
Gates grew up in East Garfield Park and attended Lane Tech for high school. His father was a roofer and his mother a teacher who wanted her only son — of nine children — to be a pastor, and if not a pastor, then at least a civil servant with the security of a city job. After college at Iowa State, where Gates studied pottery but majored in urban planning, he landed that city job, at the Chicago Transit Authority, working as the CTA’s arts planner under future Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett.
Gates has often credited his bureaucratic command of policy as key to his unique success. He is a visionary who also excels at operations, fundraising, contracts — manifesting big ideas into reality. “Logistics and poetics,” he sums it up at the Smart.
In 2006, when Gates started as an arts administrator at the University of Chicago and settled on the South Side, he bought his first property, a defunct candy store at 6900 South Dorchester Ave. The block was a mile south of the university and in other respects, a world away. The Grand Crossing neighborhood suffered from disinvestment and population loss. Gates purchased the vacant property next door as well, for $16,000.
Since then, he or Rebuild have bought a half-dozen other properties on or near the block. Gates famously paid $1 to the city for a nearby neoclassical bank, shuttered since the 1960s, so long as he raised the millions for its restoration. The Stony Island Arts Bank is now an event space and gallery that also houses several archival collections, including the library and catalog of Ebony and Jet magazines from the Johnson Publishing Company, and the vinyl record collection of house music icon Frankie Knuckles.
Gates, often working with a team, has used materials from renovations and from other castoff collections as raw materials in his own art creations, which when sold have helped fund other acquisitions and growth. On the secondary auction market, Gates’ pieces have fetched north of $800,000 at their peak.
“What does one do with the challenge of excess?” he muses at the Smart.
Gates turned a closed Anheuser-Busch warehouse in Grand Crossing into his studio. He went in on a deal to repurpose a nearby public housing complex. This month, Rebuild “reopened” a Catholic elementary school on South Dorchester that the foundation bought in 2014, when the building was slated for demolition. Renamed the Land School, the rehabbed 40,000 square-foot property (the arts organization’s largest “space-based project”) is meant to be an anchor for its work in the community — a site of education, programming and archival stewardship.
Making discarded objects new again
The show at the Smart Museum revolves mostly around discarded materials Gates acquired over the two decades he has worked at the University of Chicago. Visitors will see display cases that for a century held ancient artifacts in the antiquities museum on campus. There are oak pews removed from the university’s Bond Chapel; books that belonged to a deceased Russian film scholar named Robert Bird.
“Archives are the receipts of the truth of people’s lives,” Gates koans.
The exhibition features a film Gates made using many of the 72,000 glass lantern slides previously owned by the university’s art history department. He constructed an imposing wall-like sculpture from the slate removed from Rockefeller Memorial Chapel during a reroofing.
“There’s a Duchamp aspect of Theaster where the creation process isn’t always him creating something,” says Vanja Malloy, the Smart Museum’s director. “The choice of what to preserve, what to care for, what to draw attention to is the creation process.”
Part of the thrill of this show, and of Gates’ work generally, is pondering what art is and what it can do. As an artist whose practice includes real-estate transactions and social renewal, Gates has faced criticism locally before: allegations of being a developer and gentrifier. Of having too many white people in positions of leadership at his organization. Of imbalances of power in his workplaces. Gates insists that his decisions to celebrate and invest in Black Chicago — something he is very proud of — have been steered by his own fertile mind and aesthetic impulses.
“I didn’t restore 6916 or 18, or any of the work on Dorchester, so that it would be some kind of regenerative tool for the neighborhood,” he says. “I did it because I felt artistically and spiritually compelled to do it.”
With Gates, there is frequently an elusiveness, brought on by the complexity and play of his art, as well as by his parable-like explanations. “Unto Thee” is not a career retrospective; the Smart is nowhere near large enough. But the show does offer the chance for people to judge the range of his work for themselves.
When Gates has exhibited in other cities and continents, he transported pieces of Chicago with him, performing in some ways his practice of South Side urban intervention. Here, Smart and Rebuild are partnering to run tours of the Dorchester properties.
“There’s an opportunity to bring people outside of the Smart into these spaces, to experience it and to learn about what he’s doing in his community,” Malloy says.
As part of the programming, Gates will be in conversation with others in the new Land School. He and his musical group, The Black Monks, will perform in Bond Chapel for three hours. At the renovated Arts Bank, a DJ will spin records from the Frankie Knuckles archive. During the run this fall of “Unto Thee,” Richard Gray Gallery, which represents Gates in Chicago (he is represented by Gagosian in New York and White Cube in London), will also present a solo show of his recent work.
“So, it’s going to be a Theaster moment in Chicago,” Malloy says.
A spiritual shedding
Gates says he now hopes to end his stewardship of some of the materials featured in “Unto Thee,” returning to the university — or the universe — objects he has accumulated and put to new use. “The exhibition is a kind of external acknowledgment in how I regard my proximity to my own things. And for a while, I needed them, and now I don’t,” he says.
Some of the collections at the Smart will later be housed at the new Land School. Others Gates will offer to donate to museums, part of a larger shedding he is undertaking, spiritually as well as tangibly, of weighty belongings, responsibilities and expectations. He’s already downsized his number of employees, at Rebuild and his own studio, from a peak of 65 in 2016 to 15.
“I may get to a point where I have no material things left to give, and that would really excite me.”
Gates also sees the exhibit, its 20-year mark of his practice on the South Side, as a moment to rethink his relationship to Chicago. He’s been spending more time of late in Kyoto, Japan, where he says he feels freer and more appreciated.
“I want to be in a place that celebrates and nurtures my dreams, not in a place where I’m punished for them,” he says.
That this first solo museum show in his hometown is at the University of Chicago also says something to him, about how he feels he has been embraced more outside of Chicago than from within it. “The fact that it’s happening at the Smart Museum and not the Art Institute or the MCA is telling,” he adds.
Gates knows as well as any Chicagoan that what it means to be from here is to contend with the heaviness of the city’s lived history, with the beautiful, the unjust, the ugly. Gates has made that past into his medium. While he sits outside the Smart, reflecting on the deaths of both his parents, on how he wants to spend his next 20 years of creativity, he offers that this winding-down is a way for him to start up afresh, figuring out new possibilities.
“Well, you kind of clear out your storehouse to make room for more,” he says. “More opportunities and more things.”