NEW YORK, NY.- In a single decade, Gates has incubated compelling new models for legacy building, social transformation, and making art. Encompassing sculpture, painting, ceramics, video, performance, and music, his art both derives from and sustains ambitious urban renewal projects. In 2010, Gates created the Rebuild Foundation, a nonprofit platform aimed at galvanizing communities through neighborhood regeneration and the development of educational and arts programming and amenities. Many of the foundation’s initiatives have focused on the revitalization of Chicago’s South Side, creating hubs and archives for black culture, which serve as catalysts for discussions on race, equality, space, and history.
In the years since his participation in the 2010 Whitney Biennial, Gates has received widespread international recognition for stirring works such as 12 Ballads for Huguenot House at Documenta 13 (2012) and Gone Are the Days of Shelter and Martyr at the Venice Biennale in 2015, as well as major exhibitions at Fondazione Prada, Milan; Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria; and Kunstmuseum Basel. His current academic affiliations with the University of Chicago; the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; and Colby College, Waterville, Maine, aid the evolution of earlier vocational pursuits in public service, urban planning, and religious studies.
After a period of intense activity and reflection, Gates has declared his desire to focus more intently on his own oeuvre and the artworks that come out of his explorations of value, economy, and material exchange in charged social contexts. As Gates’s first gallery representative in New York, Gagosian will support the realization of exhibitions and projects across the full scope of his praxis in the context of broader intergenerational and intercultural dialogues in today’s global art scene.
Gates’s first New York exhibition is planned for Spring 2020.
Theaster Gates was born in Chicago, where he continues to live and work. Public collections include Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles. Solo exhibitions include An Epitaph for Civil Rights, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2011–12); The Listening Room, Seattle Art Museum (2011–12); Soul Manufacturing Corporation: To Make the Thing that Makes the Things, Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia (2013); Processions, Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (2016); True Value, Fondazione Prada, Milan (2016); Black Archive, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2016); How to Build a House Museum, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2016); The Minor Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2017); and Black Madonna, Kunstmuseum Basel (2018, traveling to Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany).
The Black Image Corporation, Gates’s curatorial project with the photographic archive of the Johnson Publishing Company, remains on view at Fondazione Prada Osservatorio, Milan, until January 14, 2019.
Gates is the recipient of the Graham Foundation Architecture Award (2009, 2011); United States Artists Fellowship (2012); Vera List Center Prize for Art and Politics (2012); Artes Mundi 6 Prize (2015); Smithsonian Ingenuity Award for Social Progress (2015); Kurt Schwitters Prize (2017); and Nasher Prize (2018).
For this year’s (RED) Auction, the high-profile international initiative that supports the fight against AIDS, Gates and Sir David Adjaye will curate the annual donation by artists of contemporary art and design, to be auctioned by Sotheby’s on December 5, 2018, during Art Basel Miami Beach and Design Miami/ 2018. On World AIDS Day, December 1, Gagosian will open the preview exhibition of the donated works at the Moore Building in Miami.
