THEASTER GATES

Working from Chicago, he often describes his work as operating at the intersection of city planning, object-making, and spiritual inquiry, combining salvaged materials with sound, design, and performance to address the politics of race, space, and value. Signature initiatives such as the Dorchester Projects (from 2009), the Rebuild Foundation, and the Stony Island Arts Bank, alongside series including the ‘Civil Tapestry’ works and his ongoing tar paintings and vessels, have positioned him as a leading figure in contemporary social practice art.

Gates has presented major exhibitions and commissions at institutions such as Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Tate Liverpool, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, the New Museum in New York while receiving honours including the Nasher Sculpture Prize, the Kurt Schwitters Prize, Artes Mundi 6, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2025 he was commissioned to create a monumental frieze for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago.

Early life and Career

Born in Chicago in 1973, Gates grew up in a working-class family; his father’s work as a roofer would later shape both his materials and metaphors. He first began working with clay while studying at Iowa State University in Ames, where he completed a BS in 1996, before travelling to Tokoname, Japan, to study pottery.

Gates went on to receive an MA in fine arts and religious studies from the University of Cape Town in 1998 and an MA in urban planning from Iowa State University in 2006, combining interests in ceramics, theology, and the built environment. These strands came together in his early performance Plate Convergence (Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, 2007), a staged dinner based on a fictional collaboration between a Black family and a Japanese ceramicist, which foreshadowed his fusion of storytelling, social ritual, and sculptural form.

Works, Series and Methods

Much of Gates’ work unfolds through architectural and urban interventions that treat buildings as both sculptural objects and social tools. In 2010 he founded the Rebuild Foundation, a non-profit platform dedicated to neighbourhood regeneration, community arts programming, and cultural development in Chicago, particularly on the city’s South Side. Through Rebuild, more than 40 buildings have been rescued from abandonment and reimagined as libraries, archives, performance venues, and housing, including projects such as the Stony Island Arts Bank, St Laurence School, and the Dorchester Art and Housing Collaborative.

At Documenta 13 in Kassel (2012), Gates extended this work into a transatlantic project with 12 Ballads for Huguenot House, in which derelict 19th-century buildings in Kassel and Chicago were partially dismantled and rebuilt using each other’s materials, then activated through live performances. Across these initiatives, salvaged objects—pews, glass slides, books, and archival materials—are redeployed as living repositories of Black cultural memory

In sculpture and painting, Gates frequently uses found and industrial materials from his immediate environment. Beginning in 2011, the Civil Tapestry series stitched salvaged fire hoses over wooden supports, producing abstract, minimalist compositions that nonetheless recall the violent suppression of Civil Rights demonstrations using high-pressure hoses. In 2012 he introduced tar as a central medium, creating dense, high-relief paintings that pay tribute to his father’s roofing work; later bronze wall reliefs translate scarred, tar-papered roof surfaces into a durable, monumental register.

Gates is also a key figure in contemporary archival practice, treating collections as materials to be reorganised, reprinted, and performed. In 2018 he launched Black Madonna Press to distribute works drawn from his extensive holdings of print and photographic media, and his ongoing project Black Image Corporation (2018–) re-presents images from the Johnson Publishing Company—publisher of Ebony and Jet—to foreground historic portrayals of Black middle-class life. Selections from this archive, together with furnishings and ephemera from Johnson Publishing’s offices, have featured in exhibitions at Kunstmuseum Basel, Osservatorio Fondazione Prada in Milan (later travelling to Gropius Bau, Berlin), and Haus der Kunst in Munich.

Since 2009, Gates has led the Black Monks, a musical ensemble that channels secular and sacred Black music through experimental improvisation and dialogue. He has brought this performative practice into museums through projects such as the Processions series at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC (2016–19), which investigated “sonic imagination” and celebrated Black history and culture through workshops, marches, and concerts

Themes and Context

Across architecture, sculpture, performance, and sound, Gates’ practice interrogates how race, class, and the built environment intersect, asking how art might repair or reconfigure places marked by disinvestment and historical erasure. His work is often situated within social practice and Black conceptual art, yet it also engages land art, craft traditions, and minimalism through a disciplined use of modular forms and industrial materials.

A recurring concern is the status of Black objects, images, and spaces, with Gates positioning himself as a “keeper of objects” who extends the lives of culturally significant materials while challenging their historical marginalisation. Projects such as Young Lords and Their Traces at the New Museum (2022), Black Chapel for the Serpentine Pavilion in London (2022), and Afro-Mingei at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo (2024) frame his practice as a dialogue between Black histories, global craft lineages, and contemporary social practice, including his long-standing engagement with Japanese ceramics and folk-craft philosophy.​

Exhibitions, Commissions and Recognition

Gates has staged major solo exhibitions at institutions including the Studio Museum in Harlem, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Tate Liverpool, the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, Haus der Kunst in Munich, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Kunstmuseum Basel, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the New Museum in New York, and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. In 2022 the New Museum organised Young Lords and Their Traces, his first museum survey, while the same year he designed Black Chapel, the twenty-first Serpentine Pavilion in London, as a space for contemplation, gathering, and sound

In 2024–25, the Mori Art Museum presented Theaster Gates: Afro-Mingei, the largest solo exhibition in Japan by a Black artist, focusing on the influence of Japanese traditions on his hybrid practice. In 2025 the Rebuild Foundation opened the Land School in Chicago, transforming a former elementary school into a site for cultural programming, educational initiatives, and archival stewardship, and Gates undertook a major commission to create a monumental frieze for the Obama Presidential Center, set to open in 2026.​

Gates is a professor at the University of Chicago and served as artist-in-residence at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles in 2018–19. His awards include Artes Mundi 6 (2017), the French government’s Chevalier de l’Ordre national de la Légion d’honneur, the Frederick Kiesler Prize for Architecture and the Arts (2021), the Isamu Noguchi Award (2023), the Vincent Scully Prize from the National Building Museum in Washington, DC (2023), and a Guggenheim Fellowship awarded in 2025, alongside earlier honours such as the Nasher Sculpture Prize and the Kurt Schwitters Prize.

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Ocula | 2026