Theaster Gates’s oeuvre is among the most conceptually and materially rich in contemporary art, anchored equally in the canons of art history, the racial ideology of the Black diaspora, and the artist’s own personal history. Through an art practice predicated on cultural reclamation and social empowerment, Gates exchanges and recharges objects and ideas, proposing the artwork as a communicating vessel or sacred reliquary of recollected histories, critical vitality, and shared experience.
Gates first began using clay as a student in the 1990s. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in ceramics and urban planning from Iowa State University, he spent a year in Tokoname, Japan, studying pottery. For Gates, it is the cycle of labor and everyday use that sacralizes the clay vessel, endowing it with transcendent communal and ritualistic meaning.
The Benaki Museum is pleased to present a group of Gates’ recent large-scale ceramic works in the Prehistoric, Classical and Roman Antiquities Galleries of the Museum of Greek Culture. Juxtaposing contemporary and ancient works will prompt open-ended associations between objects and their materiality, addressing the importance of making and manual labor as well as the spiritual relation to the earth embodied by ceramic practices throughout time and across cultures.
In this diverse group of seven unique large-scale vessels, glazed and fired to produce a range of effects —from chalky white and crackled to dark and biomorphic with a lustrous metallic sheen— Gates synthesizes ancient traditions and modern aesthetics, drawing elective affinities between Eastern, Western, and African techne. His consideration of the clay vessel as a universal object of ritual significance, which testifies to the primordial relationship between humankind and clay, is given full expression in the Benaki Museum galleries by virtue of comparison with ancient ceramic works from across the Eastern Mediterranean zone.