The Smart Museum at the University of Chicago has just unveiled plans for a major mid-career survey of the work of one of the city’s most famous artists, Theaster Gates. Under the working title “Unto Thee,” the show will open this fall (September 23) and run through February of next year.
For an artist who is almost synonymous with his native city, it’s surprising that this exhibition marks Gates’s first solo museum show in Chicago, despite having had a string of high-profile institutional shows in other cities around the world.
“I think this is the first full exhibition of a full idea in Chicago,” Gates told me in a phone interview. “It’s really nice to come home, because in a way, my career started out in the world. I wasn’t really homegrown even though I was already doing more of the social side of my practice at home for years.”
According to the museum website, the show is “rooted in several core collections of objects,” that have been part of the artist’s practice and which he acquired through the university, where he has been a professor of visual arts for nearly two decades.
Smart Museum director Vanja Malloy told me the artist’s lack of a major institutional solo show in the Windy City came up during one of their casual conversations. She got to know Gates better when he chaired the search committee for the director job she eventually landed.
“Theaster Gates: Assembly Hall,” September 5, 2019 through January 12, 2020,
Target Gallery. Photo by Bobby Rogers for Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
“The opportunities of doing a show at the Smart Museum are really exciting,” said Malloy. “One, this is not a new institution for him, he’s been really engaged with and committed, for a very long time. Also, it’s the South Side, where he has been working, and has matured and developed as an artist. His practice is in the city.”
The university materials that Gates has mined and consistently used in his practice range from the school’s department of art history, including glass lantern slides and vitrines from the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, to paint-stained concrete from the floors of Midway studios, and wooden pews that were made for the campus’ Bond Chapel. All of the objects were at some point “discarded and identified as no longer needed,” by the school. So Gates took stewardship of them.
“It’s not a retrospective of my practice, but a retrospective of the materials that I’ve gleaned and the way that I had used them over the last 15 years,” Gates told me. Of the title, “Unto Thee,” he said “it’s kind of like returning these materials back to their source.”
Malloy delved into how Gates approaches the materials, transforming not just their use but their meaning. With the glass slides for instance, the art history department was shedding them as part of a modernization effort. “They were super heavy and they didn’t know what to do with them. Theaster used them in his own practice, and he’s also thinking about the way that we have narrated art history over time. There’s a lot of layers and meaning that he mines from these objects, in the way that he positions them and uses them,” she noted.
“Theaster Gates: Assembly Hall,” September 5, 2019 through January 12, 2020,
Target Gallery. Photo by Bobby Rogers for Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
Gates will also be filling the museum lobby, which hosts rotating displays, with a special large-scale installation that will be up for the rest of the year. He acquired a collection of roughly 350 African masks over time, and will display them with a dramatic installation across the walls, accompanied by music from the collection of famous late DJ Frankie Knuckles whose archive Gates acquired.
The display of the masks ties in to the museum’s larger initiative of provenance and collections research, said Malloy. “Some of the masks are really valuable and have cultural and religious significance, while others are replicas meant for the mass market,” yet they’re all mixed together and given equal space.
As Gates explained to me of the artworks and objects in the show, “they’re not in the same psychological condition that they were given or the same core materials. They’re returning with some ‘stank’ on them. And that ‘stank’ has to do with the fact that they’ve been gussied up. They’ve had a parade around the world and they’re coming home.”
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
