Theaster Gates
An Architecture Waiting to be Used

Trained as a ceramicist and with degrees in both Urban Planning and Religious Studies, the Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates has developed a hybridized practice combining elements of contemporary art, urban planning, and community activism. An implicit curatorial impulse drives Gates’ practice, from his object-based works to his social projects. The artist draws liberally from his immediate surroundings to create his sculptural and installation works — which often engage black history and iconography — and invests the funds from the sale of these works back into the development of socially engaged endeavors like his initiative, The Dorchester Projects, a community centre that includes a library and archive, as well as an ongoing program of performances, dinners, and other events.

Throughout his practice, the artist salvages and appropriates structures as if they are “an architecture waiting to be used.” Gates once used this term in a performance to describe an empty church, yet this metaphor of institutions and history lying in wait to be scavenged and repurposed crops up again and again in his work, whether in a series of sculptures about the legacy of the civil rights movement, performances that evoke the traditions of black churches within the parameters of contemporary art institutions, or The Dorchester Projects, which literally transforms abandoned buildings into viable sites for local cultural production and exchange. While Gates fervently resists being described as a “social worker,” mediation forms the core of his practice. What emerges from the artist’s interdisciplinary approach is not only an economically self-sustainable vision for the intersection of entrepreneurship, social responsibility, and contemporary art, but also a framework for the production, circulation and interrogation of black history and culture.