Before he was an internationally acclaimed artist, Theaster Gates was known to the people in his life as a keeper of old and discarded things. In the mid 2000s, Gates was working as an arts administrator at the University of Chicago, while also buying derelict buildings on the city’s South Side and turning them into artists’ studios or repositories for his collections of books, records, and photographic slides. When someone at the university had something to get rid of, he’d get a call. “I was not anticipating that it would be a big part of my art practice,” he recalls. “I was just a young kid.”
Twenty years and many thousands of objects later, Gates is a professor of visual art at the University of Chicago and a Guggenheim Fellow, and has collaborated with Prada. His work—which often examines Black American culture in the form of mixed-media installations—has been shown at the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., London’s Serpentine Gallery, and the Palais de Tokyo, in Paris.
His latest exhibition, “Unto Thee,” which opened September 23 at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art, unites his own work with pieces from the university’s archives. It’s also a meaningful moment: though Gates grew up in the city’s East Garfield Park neighborhood, this is his first solo show in his hometown.
“I’m reflecting on what happened these last 20 years, and surveying the materials given to me,” he says. The show’s title considers “what happens when you surrender all of the effort, and give it away.”
From left: Bobby Rogers/Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Rebuild Foundation
The exhibition presents paintings, installations, sculpture, ceramics, and films from several of the university’s departments, including vitrines from the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures. There are also wooden pews made for the school’s Bond Chapel and 72,000 glass slides from the art-history department, all of which were bequeathed to Gates over the years. There is also a site-specific installation of 350 African masks that Gates preserved, presented alongside a soundtrack from the vinyl collection of the late Dinh Nguyen, also known as DJ Natty Hô, a French-Vietnamese DJ whose catalog Gates received.
Gates’s large-scale ceramics—a practice he honed while studying in Tokoname, a town in central Japan, in 2004—are also on view. Japanese craft continues to influence Gates, and he recently returned to the home of one of his teachers, master ceramist Ryoji Koie, who died in 2020. Gates visited Koie’s mountainside studio in Gifu with Koie’s daughter, who shared that her father would be okay with the studio decomposing into the mountain. “He wasn’t interested in preservation,” Gates says.
