All is Fairs
by Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, May 7th, 2012
This year, the Armory Show art fair, which was held in March in two cavernous, steel-rafted halls on the Hudson River piers in the West Fifties, came with an official artist: Theaster Gates. A charismatic thirty-nine-year-old Chicago "urban planner, educator, composer and social catalyst," as he is described in a brochure from his dealer Kavi Gupta, Gates makes elegant assembled sculpture from the detritus of South Side slums...
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The New Revolutionary
by Michele Robercchi, Mousse Contemporary Art Magazine, Issue 32 February - March 2012
What role can a revolutionary play today? Starting with this question, Michele Robecchi zooms in on the practice of Theaster Gates, the artist from Chicago who through the creation of soul food restaurants and the construction of temporary temples generates multicultural dialogue. Programmatically eluding classification, Gates institutes physical and non-physical spaces in which to exercise the right to say challenging things without getting trapped in facile categories..........
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Theaster Gates
by Christian Viveros-Faune, Art Review, Jan/Feb 2012
Great art according to the American poet Emily Dickinson, is what makes the hair on on the back of your neck stand up. So it is with the relentlessly civic-minded performance, sculpture, installation and urban reclamation work of Theaster Gates. continued...
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Theaster Gates
by Lilly Wei, Art in America, December 2011
ARTISTS OFTEN TALK about real estate, but Theaster Gates, 38, multi medium artist, designer and musician, deals in it. An urban planner and developer, community organizer and cultural entrepreneur, Gates is also the inaugural director of Arts and Public Life at the University of Chicago; the new program will include artist residencies and collaborations with area cultural institutions.
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Museums for Tolerance
by Heidi Zuckerman, Huffington Post, Dec 8, 2011
Last year Rocco Landesman, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), spoke at a meeting of the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD). He came to speak with us about what he perceived as a lack of civility in contemporary American society and to seek our help. His goal was a reactivation of the traditional "town square," where people of all different backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences have historically intermixed. He suggested that museums were an appropriate and logical place to emphasize the town hall concept.
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Creative Rebuild:Theaster Gates in Hyde Park, St. Louis
by Francesca Wilmott, art 21:blog, August 1, 2011
Artist Theaster Gates likes systems. And what he likes more than a system itself is knowing how to leverage it. Though formally trained in handling clay, Gates also uses the structure of neighborhoods, cultural institutions, and universities as his artistic medium. continued....
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The house that Theaster Gates built
by Deanna Isaacs, Chicago Reader, June 2, 2011
In 2006 then-emerging artist Theaster Gates, looking to buy himself a home, came across a squat masonry building on the
6900 block of South Dorchester. The neighborhood had a dicey reputation, and the place wasn't in great shape, but it was close to the University of Chicago, where Gates was hoping to land a job—and, in an overheated market, the price was within his budget. The building, which once had a candy store in the front and living quarters in the rear, looked like a good candidate for conversion to an artist's live/work space. He snagged it for $130,000 and moved in.
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Theaster Gates
by Julia Langbein, ARTFORUM, May 2011
In the past, Theaster Gates has couched his work in historical narratives—a 2010 show at the Milwaukee Art Museum, for example, found the artist reimagining himself as David Drake, the nineteenth-century “slave potter” of Edgefield, South Carolina. Since 2009, in his ongoing Dorchester Project, Gates has literally made history a source, specifically the neglected history of Chicago’s predominantly Black South Side. There, the artist, who is trained in both urban planning and fine arts, has been purchasing abandoned homes on a block of Dorchester Avenue, gutting them, and using what he digs out as raw material, while simultaneously transforming the Dorchester complex into an art and archival center. Continued...
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In Grand Crossing, A House Becomes a Home for Art
by Rachel Cromidas, New York Times, April 7, 2011
The wooden floors of the house at 6918 South Dorchester Avenue came from a West Side bowling alley. The stacks of vinyl records once stocked a Hyde Park record shop, and some of the windows once served as doors in a museum. Viewed from the kitchen, the words “Museum Hours: 9 to 5” run backward across the glass.
Continued...
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Free-for-All Spirit Breezes Into a Vast Art Fair
by Roberta Smith, New York Times, March 3, 2011
And yet if art is something you must have — or think you want to have — in your life, you stand to gain from perusing one or more of the several art fairs that have set down stakes across Manhattan this weekend. Open yourself to the best in them and they become pools of information that can humble, broaden and energize you in significant ways.
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Dinner with Mark Bradford (at Dorchester Projects)
by Theaster Gates, The Mark Bradford Project / Museum of Contemprary Art Chicago, February 2011
http://themarkbradfordproject.org/
Urban Outfitter: Fresh off the Whitney Biennial, Theaster Gates Jr. shakes up his hometown art fair
by Rachel Wolff, Chicago Magazine, May 2010
All Theaster Gates Jr. wanted was to be a good city bureaucrat. He worked as an arts planner for the Chicago Transit Authority in the early 2000s, helping artists navigate the lengthy process of getting their work on the walls of el stations. It was all great, in theory. But Gates got impatient.
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Artist Theaster Gates Can't Stop Reaching New Heights
by Rachel Furnari, New City, March 31, 2010
When it comes to his artwork, Gates has no problem overreaching. Arrange for the 200-plus members of the South Shore Drill Team to perform for 150-plus white academics at the University of Chicago where he works and then deliver a companion lecture declaring “you need niggers”? Not a problem. Decide to redevelop an entire block at 69th and Dorchester under the name Dorchester Projects? Walk into the Prairie Avenue Bookstore during its closing days and ask for all of the books to create a reading room on the South Side? Absolutely. Gates will tell you a lot about his ambition, but he’s also a realist. “I can’t finish Dorchester Projects by myself, it’s big enough to receive other people.” He’s also not afraid; and until he’s described the effect that this fear has over cultural and social development in the black communities of postindustrial cities like St. Louis, Milwaukee, Detroit and Omaha, it’s hard to understand how powerful this self-assurance is. He claims easily, “I don’t ask myself ‘What right do I have to live on my block and think I can do all of this?’ I have the right.”
In the last year, Gates has completed ambitious collaborations with artists, museums, musicians, historians and the Kohler Company, culminating in an invitation to participate in the 2010 Whitney Biennial, which opened in New York at the end of February. At the Biennial, Gates was given the outdoor sculpture court for an “impresario piece” titled “Cosmology of Yard.” Gates has said that one of the fundamental questions of the project was: “How do you overcome Marcel Breuer,” the museum’s architect? His response to the spatial and social problem of the Brutalist cement pit at the Whitney was in some ways intentionally incomplete. Perhaps there is no way to overcome Breuer’s architecture and Gates sought to embrace the space’s prosaic functionality as both a food court and smoker’s lounge. His solution was to build out a temporary kind of architecture that includes a central pavilion, a looped sound and video piece, and several of the oversize, fantastical shoeshine chairs built for his performance called “Shine,” in 2009.
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A Q&A Session with Theaster Gates
by Steve Ruiz, Jettison Quarterly, Fall 2010
With an artistic practice broad enough to include urban-planning inspired social projects, spiritual musical performance and an ability to critique large cultural institutions while still attracting their interest, it's no surprise that Theaster Gates has had a busy time the last few years...
JettisonQuarterly.com
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The Slant on Theaster Gates
by Abraham Ritchie, ARTslanT, May 2010
Theaster Gates was one of several Chicago-based artists included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial. If you missed his work there (Cosmology of the Yard, 2010), there's still time to see his solo exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum, "To Speculate Darkly: Theaster Gates and Dave the Potter" (April 16 - August 1, 2010) or his work included in the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston's "Hand + Made: The Performative Impulse in Art and Craft" (May 15 - July 25, 2010). Theaster Gates' practice takes many forms, and with pottery taking central stage in his most recent exhibitions, ceramics seemed like a good place to begin our conversation...
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'To Speculate Darkly' promises to amplify voices, both old and new
by Lonnie Turner, Journal Sentinel Online, April 14, 2010
A life-size oil painting of Frederick Layton, whose collection formed the precursor to the Milwaukee Art Museum, lords over a collection of American paintings in the museum's lower-level galleries. Around him, luminescent portraits of a privileged colonial class steadily gaze back at us.
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Artists gear up for Armory: Local talent represented at international fair, Biennial exhibition in New York
by Lauren Viera, Chicago Tribune, March 4, 2010
It's Armory Week. Falling on certain ears, this news conjures knights conferencing in gaggles, their heavy chain mail collectively clinking. But creative types know better: Armory Week is one of the biggest events of the year for visual artists.
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Clay Feat: Theaster Gates and a gospel choir engage a slave potter’s legacy at the Milwaukee Art Museum
by Lauren Weinberg, Time Out Chicago Magazine, April 10, 2010
Theaster Gates first learned about David Drake while studying urban planning and ceramics at Iowa State University. Born around 1800, Drake—often simply referred to as Dave—was a South Carolinian slave who became a master potter, making practical, beautiful vessels such as an 1858 storage jar, which appears in the Milwaukee Art Museum’s exhibition “Theaster Gates: To Speculate Darkly,” opening Friday 16.
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