THE BUREAUCRAT
THEASTER GATES IS the kind of artist whose work is perpetually on view somewhere in the world. When we met for the first time, in May at his studio in Chicago’s Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood, he had just returned from opening exhibitions at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. His practice is all-encompassing. He is known for installations that use supplies and furnishings from old buildings, paying tribute to their past lives — as homes, stores, churches. These installations serve double or even triple duty: They are works of art in themselves, but they can also become venues for parties or performances. His sculptures and paintings employ construction materials like wood, rubber and roofing tar. He’s a master ceramist and a musician and singer who performs with his experimental group, the Black Monks, in which he’s known as the Abbot.
For years, Gates has acquired archives, and he sees their stewardship as integral to his work. Many preserve Black American cultural memory, like the roughly 20,000-volume library that once belonged to the Johnson Publishing Company, publisher of Ebony and Jet, and the 5,000-record vinyl collection of Frankie Knuckles, the Chicago D.J. at whose late ’70s parties house music was born. He is currently advising an arts-led redevelopment project in Philadelphia and an initiative to preserve Houston’s Freedmen’s Town, a historically Black district in the city’s Fourth Ward. He chairs the diversity council at Prada, where he runs a mentorship program for designers of color, and he is developing partnerships in Japan with small family-owned businesses to produce incense and sake. In his studio, a 30,000-square-foot compound that occupies two former factories that he bought in 2019, he served me tea from Horii Shichimeien, a venerable Kyoto maker, in a stoneware cup.
In his hometown, Gates is recognized as an entrepreneur who buys and restores properties on Chicago’s South Side. He puts these properties to unusual, sometimes less than practical use. The core of his holdings is a quiet half-mile stretch of South Dorchester Avenue, where he started acquiring run-down houses in 2006. He filled some with archives — thousands of art books purchased from a shuttered bookshop; LPs from a defunct record store. One house became his residence.
Gates’s business dealings and art making are not at odds: Salvage from the buildings goes into his art installations; proceeds from his art sales fund his building renovations and community programs. But they also stem from shared soil — his upbringing as the son of a roofer on Chicago’s West Side, his training as an urban planner — and commingle in his projects to the point where it would be artificial to separate them. Gates himself draws no distinction: He hopes to demonstrate, he told me, “an open model for what an artist can be.”
Gates took a highly unusual path into the art world and, as an artist, though inspired by multiple movements and histories, he’s created something sui generis. He rebuffs categories like “social practice” — jargon for participative art with civic goals — but cites predecessors like Donald Judd, who made furniture as well as geometric objects, and the Fluxus movement, with its interest in everyday materials and spontaneous performances. He’s an inheritor of the legacy of Marcel Duchamp and his readymades, mass-produced and utilitarian objects that the French artist displayed as art. In a sense, Gates has scaled up the method. Duchamp’s readymades include a snow shovel and a bicycle wheel; Gates’s are old factories and homes. To some extent, he doesn’t think of them as property at all. “The beauty of these buildings gives me a tremendous amount of joy,” he said. “It’s an artistic idiom of its own.”
A bureaucrat before he was ever an artist, Gates worked as an art planner for the Chicago Transit Authority from 2000 to 2005. After that, he began investing in Grand Crossing when he moved to the South Side to become an arts administrator at the University of Chicago, where he’s now a professor. “The neighborhood had stigma, but the people were great and interesting,” he said. He recognized the terrain: Black neighborhoods that faced disinvestment and crime but were once self-contained and self-possessed — places where, he said, “the Black doctor and lawyer and bus driver and maid were all on the same block, and they all went to the same church.” By revitalizing these quotidian spaces — homes, a bank, a school, hardware stores that he has bought, often with their contents, when they were going out of business — he is summoning a kind of utopian memory in the service of new functions. “It’s not just the bourgeois dimension of ‘He owns a building,’” Gates’s friend the artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa, 63, told me. “It’s more about a transgression of some primary interdictions with regard to Black people, which is that you cannot manage material. You will be material. But to manage material is a whole other thing.” Through his investments in Grand Crossing — even when they take unconventional forms — Gates sees himself as helping Chicago to “hold its Black self together.”
He took me down a side street edged by commuter rail tracks where in 2021 he opened Kenwood Gardens, a sanctuary with lawns, wildflowers and a pavilion that hosts house-music parties in the summer. It occupies 13 lots that were in decline — notorious, he said, for burned-out cars and prostitution. A wall encircling the garden is made partly from bricks that he saved from St. Laurence Catholic Church, a neighborhood anchor that the archdiocese sold and that was razed in 2014.
“When I built the perimeter wall, I didn’t own the property,” Gates said. “I built the wall to stop the bad stuff.” He then bought the lots, many loaded with tax arrears. “The city was quite happy to help us negotiate the land sales,” he said, “because they would finally have a steward.” Building his unauthorized wall, Gates said, was a case of tactical urbanism, as citizen initiatives that bypass city bureaucracy or goad it to action are called in the planning business.
Gates is compact, with a shaved head and salt-and-pepper beard, and he dresses comfortably in collarless shirts, loose pants and leather loafers. When he gets excited about a topic, he can take on the tone of a minister addressing his congregation. He is too obviously sincere, even earnest, to come across as an operator. And yet he has both an aptitude and an appetite for policy and negotiations. In a famous deal, he purchased the former Stony Island State Savings Bank, a 1920s edifice facing demolition, from the city in 2012 for $1 and the commitment to restore it — which he funded in part by selling salvaged marble slabs at Art Basel for $5,000 each. It now hosts collections, exhibitions and events. “You learn policy, you know the rules, you play with it,” he said. “Then you can make a case.” Romi Crawford, 58, a professor of visual and critical studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, described how Gates enfolds transactions into his art as “contract aesthetics.” Gates has fielded periodic criticism that he is too amenable to the rich and powerful. He rejects this, returning to the word “tactical.” “If you’re talking about protesting, there are people who are better protesters,” he said. “If you’re talking about getting [things] done in the city, I can do it better than most artists. I can do it better than most developers.”
We arrived at the bank building. Outside was the gazebo where the 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot dead by a police officer in Cleveland in 2014; working with Rice’s mother, Gates brought the structure to Chicago to save it from demolition. (It belongs back in Cleveland, he’s said, but its temporary care is his “duty as a Black man,” he told the Guardian in 2019.) Inside the bank some 50 people had gathered for happy hour — including Frederick Dunson, the president of the Frankie Knuckles Foundation; Yaw Agyeman, one of the Black Monks, who performed with the musician Sharon Udoh; and the D.J. Celeste Alexander, a house-music veteran.
Gates greeted the assembled in his preacher mode. “I was telling the sisters in the congregation, ‘I want to be free from the things that hinder me,’” he said. He likes his gatherings “underprogrammed,” like his buildings. “There is absolutely no agenda,” he continued. All he wanted was someplace “where we can just be together.”
THE TRAVELER
GATES RECENTLY TURNED 51; a Virgo, he notes. He still lives on the South Side, although now in an apartment closer to Hyde Park. He travels constantly. He has never married or had children, but he is in a relationship that he and his partner prefer to keep out of the spotlight. “I have love in my life and I’m extremely happy,” he said.
He was born in 1973, the sole boy after eight girls. He describes a close and dense family life in the East Garfield Park neighborhood on the West Side shaped by the labor and small property acquisitions of his father, Theaster Gates Sr., and by the devout values of his mother, Lorine, a schoolteacher. His parents had bought their four-apartment home amid late ’60s white flight for $23,000, paying installments to the seller, who eventually forgave the balance.
Gates toggled between worlds, as he has done ever since. He was bused to the North Side starting in fifth grade, then attended Lane Tech, a selective public high school; in that respect, he told me, “I’m a child of integration and affirmative action.” In the neighborhood, he said, “every summer, more of my friends were in gangs.” He was different: churchy, charismatic, coddled by his big sisters. In lieu of an allowance, his father paid him to help on roofing jobs and fixing buildings. “I was around serial entrepreneurship and prayerful way-making,” Gates told me. “It wasn’t a way to get rich. It was a way to look out for your family and have control of the emotional environment, not have an outside force telling you what to do.”
Summers in Mississippi reinforced that idea. In a classic Great Migration pattern, his parents had come up from the Delta — his father from Yazoo City, his mother from Humphreys County nearby. Most of her siblings remained there, and Gates would spend summers with his uncle Herbert, who owned a 500-acre farm, growing corn, cotton and soy beans and raising cattle and hogs. It was an education in the land and its stakes: Other Black families lived on the farm — “The only word we have for it is ‘sharecroppers,’” Gates said — and the surrounding white farmers were trying to squeeze Herbert out. Mississippi, Gates said, is where he learned to appreciate scale: “I understand square blocks because I understand acres.” It’s also a recurring reference in his art. For a 2022 exhibition of contemporary takes on the Great Migration at the Mississippi Museum of Art, he designed an installation called “Double Wide” inspired by the trailer on his uncle’s land that was a candy store by day and a juke joint after dark.
Arriving at Iowa State University in 1992, Gates decided to major in urban planning (in which he’d later earn a master’s degree) with a double minor in studio art and religious studies. He learned about nonconformists like Samuel Mockbee, the architect who in 1993 co-founded the Rural Studio program, known for designing homes from recycled materials in the Alabama Black Belt. On the side, he discovered pottery, becoming close with a ceramics professor, Ingrid Lilligren, who would remain a mentor.
After college, Gates won a scholarship to study for a master’s degree in traditional African religion at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Then, following a brief stint in Seattle, he returned to Chicago in 1999 when he was hired by the transit authority. After hours, he’d rent kilns at the Lillstreet Art Center. He wanted, he said, to become good at something. “I went to my day job, and I would come home, go to the studio and make pots,” he said. “That unromantic development was very helpful for me. I was gaining skill in darkness, with no one interested.”
Once, he recalled, he made three soda-fired bowls to sell at the DuSable Museum’s market devoted to Black artisans. A customer offered $75, less than Gates thought they were worth in view of his costs, leading to an epiphany. “I decided I would no longer sell the vessel,” he said. “If you believe in my world, then you might get a vessel free. But believing in my world is a greater investment than the cost of a bowl.”
In 2004, Gates took an unpaid leave and traveled to Japan to attend a summer workshop in Tokoname, a coastal city in the central region and one of the country’s designated Six Ancient Kiln towns, with a nearly thousand-year ceramics history. He lived with a host family and learned from master potters. “I wouldn’t call it instruction, though instruction was part of it,” he said. “I got something more akin to what the Bible would call impartation, where it felt like I was touched or moved.” He added: “It was permission to be a better potter, and that’s really what I needed.”
In the United States, his instruction on ceramics history had privileged European and American decorative arts. Japan, to which he’d return many times, presented a rich ceramics tradition. He was particularly interested in the Mingei movement, which started in the 1920s and celebrated the beauty of everyday craft objects and advocated support for folk artisans, joining Buddhist precepts with a critique of industrial mass production. The potters Kanjiro Kawai and Shoji Hamada, who were key Mingei figures, embraced solid, rustic forms, local clays and natural glazes, and welcomed imperfections in the finished work.
All of this gave Gates an idea that would prove pivotal for his own development as an artist. What if, he imagined, following World War II, a Japanese potter had found his way to the United States and landed in Mississippi, drawn to its soil and possibilities? What if he had married a Black woman there, perhaps a civil rights activist? What if, years later, they had died in a crash, leaving behind his body of work?
At his first major exhibition, at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago in 2007, Gates served a soul food dinner for 50 on his stoneware plates that he attributed to the potter, whom he named Shoji Yamaguchi in tribute to Hamada. The guests were a mix of wealthy Chicagoans, artists, South Side neighbors. He hired a biracial actor to play Yamaguchi’s son. Only later would Gates reveal that the work was his own.
Gates’s friend Hamza Walker, 58, the director of the alternative art space the Brick in Los Angeles who was living in Chicago at the time, told me that back then Gates called himself a “confused potter-performer.” But if anything, the show, titled “Plate Convergence,” proved his seriousness about ceramics. And it revealed Gates, suddenly, as a full-fledged conceptual artist, not averse to a little sleight of hand. Yet far from a gimmick, the story of Yamaguchi would blossom into a larger synthesis of Black and Japanese folk aesthetics that he now calls Afro-Mingei. “I imagined Yamaguchi as a speculative theory,” Gates told me. Afro-Mingei, he added, “has been a self-fulfilling proposition.”
THE HOST
THIS PAST JULY, I met Gates in Arles, France, where he’d organized the Black Artists Retreat, a gathering that he has hosted annually at various venues since 2013, and that overlapped this year with his exhibition at LUMA Arles, a sprawling art complex in a former railway yard.
In its early years, BAR, held at Gates’s studio in Chicago, was a chance for established and rising, mostly Black American, artists to connect more or less privately. It grew and eventually traveled — to the Park Avenue Armory in New York for a large, semipublic edition in 2019, and to the Serpentine Pavilion in London in 2022. But in Arles it tacked small again, with some 40-odd artists. Most were European, recommended by the London-based curators Jareh Das and Bianca A. Manu; several barely knew Gates at all. His underprogrammed spirit was back: loose scheduling, good meals, dancing. The French Ghanaian artist Eden Tinto Collins, attending BAR for the first time, told me the vibe felt like “faire foyer” — creating a hearth or home.
At LUMA, Gates had set up a pottery workshop where he and a small team were making works in public to exhibit on-site — a kind of accumulative installation that would fill the hangarlike space by the show’s closing in early November. They included tall, urnlike vessels and abstract, almost gnomic clay works. “It’s very ancestral,” the Nigerian artist Ranti Bam, 42, said.
Maja Hoffmann, 68, the Swiss contemporary-art collector and LUMA’s founder, had invested in two kilns — including an anagama (a Japanese “cave kiln”), hand-built on the grounds of La Chassagnette, the restaurant that she owns in the countryside. There, at rosé hour, Gates gathered his guests to witness him unloading the anagama after its inaugural, seven-day-long firing. The kiln, 20 feet deep with an arched fire mouth, resembled a brick dragon. Gates, in blue workwear, sang a gospel tune as pots of various shapes came out, glazed by the ash in ocher, gray and green hues: “You who are weary, stop by the potter’s house. … The potter wants to put you back together again.” There were broken shards, too, which he extracted with equal reverence.
During the early years of Gates’s rise, his ceramics were largely unknown, eclipsed by his property acquisitions and works like “Civil Tapestries” — wall-mounted sculptures made from strips of decommissioned fire hoses — and his so-called tar paintings, created from roofing materials in homage to his father. Hoffmann, now a major patron, met him in 2013 at Art Basel, around his installation of a sloping wood surface covered with tar. “I saw him more as a carpenter, a roofer,” she told me. “I didn’t realize the ceramics thing. And then we went to Chicago and I understood.”
In fact, he had been making ceramics all along, including in his own anagama in Chicago. At his studio there, Gates had shown me rooms of ceramics and pointed out techniques — cobalt-and-red iron shino glazes, mustard washes, manganese stains. There were vessels and abstract sculptures, utilitarian black bricks and even figurative warrior protectors inspired by African statuary. His recent exhibitions have increasingly featured pottery. “Black Vessel,” at Gagosian gallery in New York in 2020, included a room of ceramics, many set directly on the floor. His 2022 New Museum survey in New York, “Young Lords and Their Traces,” whose signal theme was mourning — for his mother and father, and for his friends the curator Okwui Enwezor and the writer bell hooks — made space for a large display of ceramics, as well.
His first craft, Gates suggested, had forced him to work with rigor at times when his career felt too permissive. “After you get to a certain point of ascendancy in the art world, you’re just making up your own truth,” he said. “You don’t have the burden of people even liking you. You’re entering a free fall.” He added: “I’m after a world of rules. I want somebody to say, ‘Your tea bowl is too heavy, Theaster. You can trim a little bit more off the foot. It doesn’t have the depth and dimension that it should. Keep working.’”
THE STUDENT
IN AUGUST, I visited Gates in Japan, where he’s been spending more time of late, collaborating with other artists and craftspeople. “I started building an intentional artisanal network,” he said. We were on the mezzanine of Farmoon, a tea salon and chef’s table on a side street in Kyoto. It was hot out, and the chef Masayo Funakoshi had sent up corn ice cream with tomato-infused orange blossom water, ricotta and lemon basil. Funakoshi had cooked a meal at BAR in Arles with the chef Armand Arnal; now she was preparing sweets for a tea ceremony to be held the next day inside Gates’s exhibition in Tokyo and led by Reijiro Izumi, an heir of the centuries-old Urasenke tea ceremony tradition. For the show, Gates also commissioned 30,000 bricks from the Mizuno Seitoen Lab, a company in Tokoname, plus sake from a Kyoto-based company.
We took the Shinkansen train to Nagoya, then drove to Tokoname on the Chita Peninsula. In the Meiji era, the town’s ceramics tradition, its robust high-iron-content clay and harbor location had made it a manufacturing hub for earthenware sewer pipes. But the transition to industrially manufactured metal pipes undercut Tokoname’s clay-based economy. Craft ceramics, however, endured.
The town gave off an air of permanent quiet. “When I go back to Tokoname, it’s like going back to the West Side of Chicago,” Gates said. “What’s there for me are memories and ghosts. Places that used to be open. Clay supply stores. People’s studios that, when you walk along the pottery path, you could just stop in and say hello.” Japan’s aging population has meant fewer successors and more empty workshops. “In a place that’s as culturally significant as Tokoname, there’s a need for a kind of cultural infrastructure,” he said.
Not long ago, Gates took over a seven-building compound in town and, in 2022, as part of the Aichi Triennale, he welcomed visitors to a listening room there. “I didn’t want to bring pots to Tokoname; that would be like bringing sand to the beach,” he said. “So I decided to bring my other wheels” — turntables, plus the record collection of Marva Lee Pitchford-Jolly, the Chicago potter who died in 2012. “She always wanted to go to Japan,” he said. “And so I brought her albums so that she could be here with me.”
Driving up the hill, Gates spotted a neighbor, Mr. Matsushita, 66, a bonsai artist and potter, shirtless in the window of his ground-floor study. He invited us in. Around his desk were his plants and writings, along with old fliers for exhibitions involving the German social-sculpture artist Joseph Beuys.
“Matsushita-san might be one of the greatest living thinkers in Tokoname,” Gates told me. “Just that kind of wizardlike intentionality. He takes a pine wick that’s growing in the asphalt, pulls it up, builds its root, plants it in his pot. That’s a beautiful thing.”
Through a back door lay a vast ceramics workshop with two kilns. “In Tokoname there’s no wind,” Matshushita said. “For me, Theaster brings the wind.” He added, “It’s not easy to live freely like Theaster.”
In Tokyo at the Mori Art Museum, wall text by Gates explained that Afro-Mingei was “a speculation.” In Mingei’s assertion of pride in folk craft, Gates recognized an impulse that felt similar to the Black Is Beautiful movement of the 1960s and ’70s. But the show was also his expression of thanks for Japan and its potters. “I’m a different artist in Japan,” he told me. “And I love myself here.”
The exhibition mixed familiar forms from Gates’s repertoire — ceramics, tar paintings, salvaged-wood installations — with neon sculptures and slate boards marked with names of Black and Japanese artists and movements. There were shelves laden with thousands of small sake jars. Most strikingly, on racks of wooden shelving he’d placed one of his readymade archives — almost the entire body of work that Yoshihiro Koide, a Tokoname potter, left behind at his death in 2022. The nearly 20,000 ceramic pieces, many wrapped in paper or contained in boxes, were a monument to labor and to the duty of care.
The exhibition’s organizers, Mami Kataoka and Hirokazu Tokuyama, had wanted to show a selection of these works in vitrines, Gates said. He insisted otherwise. “They were being museological,” he said. “I was being propagandistic. I’m trying to show you a world, and you can’t show a world through four objects, or taking the best specimens and presenting them. If you want to have a Theaster show, you bring all 20,000 things.”
But despite the busy world Gates has built for himself, its center is paradoxically calm. At the studio in Chicago, I’d been struck by the quiet. His operation has downsized, he said — from 65 employees at its peak, around 2016, which he admitted overwhelmed him, to just 15.
Next to go might be his collection of buildings, though it could take a while. “I did not attempt to amass a real estate holdings situation,” he said. “I was simply trying to prove the point that artists can change a place.” Now, he added, “I have to learn how to shed. In the same way that I spent two decades accumulating, I feel like I’m going to spend two decades shrinking.” At that point, he fantasized, we might find him in Kenwood Gardens, giving tea bowls away.
“As a 30-year-old, buying a building meant something,” he said. “It meant, ‘I’m a man, I’m a mature person, I can stand on my own feet.’ The second building was like, ‘I can have a studio, I can contribute to a block, I can be useful to my people.’ Now I can be useful by giving it away. I don’t need any footprint.” The goal for the next stage of his career, he said, “will be that no one needs me anymore.”