Theaster Gates

My body is capital, my brain is capital, my hands are capital, and the byproducts of my hands are capital. And once I understand my own value, I think about spatial value, the value of other people, the value of people working together, the possibility of exponential value as a result of certain kinds of bodies rubbing up against each other . —Theaster Gates Theaster Gates has incubated new models for artistic creation, social transformation, and building legacies. Traversing sculpture, performance, and archives, he explores concepts of value and economy, as well as spiritual and material exchange, as they perform in charged social contexts. Gates first began to work with clay at Iowa State University, Ames, where he received a BS in 1996. After graduating, he studied pottery in Tokoname, Japan, before receiving an MA in fine arts and religious studies from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, in 1998 and an MA in urban planning from Iowa State in 2006. These seemingly disparate interests came together in Gates’s oeuvre as early as 2007, in Plate Convergence at the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago. For this performance piece, he organized a dinner party themed on a fictional tale of a cultural collaboration between a Black family and a Japanese ceramicist. In 2010 Gates established the Rebuild Foundation, a nonprofit platform targeting neighborhood regeneration, community arts programming, and cultural development in Chicago. Many of the foundation’s projects have focused on revitalizing Chicago’s South Side—creating hubs and archives for Black culture that catalyze discussions about race, equality, space, and history. Two years later, at Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany, Gates expanded this redemptive urban initiative into a transatlantic correspondence with 12 Ballads for Huguenot House , in which two derelict nineteenth-century buildings in Kassel and Chicago underwent a mutual transmutation, whereby parts of each were reused in the rebuilding of the other and the resulting spaces were consecrated with live performances. Gates began his Civil Tapestry series in 2011, stitching salvaged fire hoses over wooden supports. These works appear abstract and minimalist but are historically charged; they evoke the Black American struggle during the Civil Rights movement, in which peaceful civilian marches were violently broken up using high-pressure hoses. In 2012 Gates introduced tar as a medium, with a series of textural, high-relief paintings in tribute to his father’s occupation as a roofer. In a subsequent series of scarred bronze wall reliefs, he immortalized the rough, tar-papered surfaces of Chicago roofs in a sculptural material that is ancient, noble, and universal. Gates started Black Madonna Press in 2018, which distributes materials drawn from his expansive collection of print media and archival photography. His project Black Image Corporation (2018–) promotes new awareness of the legendary Johnson Publishing Company, which circulated positive, glamorous portrayals of Black middle-class life through influential magazines such as Ebony and Jet from the 1940s through the 2010s. Selections of images from the company’s extensive archive, along with relics from its corporate offices, have featured in Gates’s exhibitions at institutions including Kunstmuseum Basel (2018); Osservatorio Fondazione Prada, Milan (2018–19, traveled to Gropius Bau, Berlin); and Haus der Kunst, Munich (2019–20). Since 2009 Gates has led the Black Monks, a musical ensemble channeling traditional secular and religious Black music through experimental improvisation and dialogue. Gates has brought his performative practice into the museum, including in his ongoing series Processions —held at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, between 2016 and 2019—which investigates “sonic imagination” and celebrates Black history and culture through music workshops and recitals. In 2022, the New Museum, New York, organized Young Lords and Their Traces, Gates’s first museum survey, bringing together his paintings, sculptures, videos, performance, and archival collections. The same year, Gates designed Black Chapel , a site for contemplation and convening, as the twenty-first Serpentine Pavilion in London. Afro-Mingei (2024), an exhibition at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, focused on the influence of Japanese traditions on his culturally hybrid practice. In 2025, the Rebuild Foundation opened the Land School in Chicago, reconstituting the site of a former elementary school for cultural programming, educational initiatives, and archival stewardship. Gates is a professor at the University of Chicago. He was artist-in-residence at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, in 2018–19. In 2017 Gates was awarded the Artes Mundi 6 prize and received the French government’s Chevalier de l’Ordre national de la Légion d’honneur. He received the Frederick Kiesler Prize for Architecture and the Arts in 2021; the Isamu Noguchi Award in 2023; the Vincent Scully Prize from the National Building Museum, Washington, DC, in 2023; and a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship.