Theaster Gates’ New Museum exhibition meditates on mourning, materials and community

Most artists would consider their first museum survey on home turf as an opportunity to celebrate personal successes. But for Theaster Gates, the Chicago-based artist, urbanist, musician and cultural icon it is also a chance to pay homage to the radical thinkers and creative forces who came before.  

Gates’ first American museum exhibition, ‘Theaster Gates: Young Lords and Their Traces’, opens 11 November 2022 at the New Museum in New York. In developing the show, he first drew from his native Chicago. Thinking about the local 1960s political group, Young Lords, and then about his personal cultural deities – such as bell hooks, Okwui Enwezor, Virgil Abloh, Sam Gilliam and Theaster Gates Sr, all of whom have passed – the exhibition is what Gates describes as ‘a personal pantheon’ and ‘a kind of memorial for different individuals who had an impact on my life and culture’.

The full range of Gates’ multidisciplinary practice, which spans pottery, found objects, sculpture, painting, video and performance (and was explored in Wallpaper's 2021 Theaster Gates interview) is showcased in an epic, site-specific installation that spreads over three floors. The museum becomes a communal space for preservation, remembrance and exchange. As one ventures through the show, there is an emotional cadence that prompts contemplation, whether it’s walking into a spacious room dominated by one of Gates’ libraries, in this case, 4,500 volumes belonging to the film and Slavic studies scholar Robert Bird (a friend of Gates, and former colleague at the University of Chicago, who passed away in 2020) presented on cast-iron Carnegie shelving; viewing a sample cross-section of the artist’s extensive collection of objects and ephemera, encased in 100-year old wooden vitrines from the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago; or hearing live music being played on A Heavenly Chord, Gates’ construction of a Hammond B3 organ with seven Leslie speakers suspended overhead. (The piece will be activated on most Saturdays throughout the show’s duration – check the museum's calendar.)

‘Young Lords and Their Traces’ presented me with the artistic time and space to grieve the lives of people who have been important to me. The New Museum is a site of mourning and mischief, an antidote to the darker emotions we experience when we lose someone who made us, whom we love, or who represents the things we believe in,’ Gates says. ‘Through this exhibition, I’m expressing that artists are not exempt from complex human emotions caused by death. The exhibition doesn’t feel like a survey of objects that I’ve made in the past. Instead, it feels much more like a survey of the ways the material world and the ancestral world come together. Art moves us because art functions as a visible mechanism for the display of deep emotion. Mourning and loss were emotions understood before there was art.’ 

He adds, ‘Making, remembrance, and the accumulation of one’s things are cultural tasks that demonstrate that art and loss have always been aligned. I hope those who experience the exhibition will consider the importance the material world plays in honouring those close to their hearts. I hope they are moved to create minor museums or shrines to those who had a profound impact on their lives, elevating the material to a higher plane. I consider creation the antithesis of death, but I am also moved to remain connected to and conversant with the great spirits who have left us. One could say that my being engaged with the elegiac is oblique, but it’s my way of keeping people alive.’ 

Viewing 20 years of work through this lens certainly reiterates Gates’ profound ability to convey meaning and significance through objects. ‘‘Young Lords and Their Traces” demonstrates a deepening of my artistic interests in objecthood,’ continues the artist. ‘In Chicago, the personal objects, the traces and the collections were always informing our work with our building projects. This show allows visitors access to the part of my brain that has always been engaged with the intimacies of other people’s lives and their possessions. 

‘While there isn’t much of a divergence, I do think this exhibition sharpens my commitment to the archive, ceramics, and narratives associated with the histories embedded in materials. This survey feels much more “essential” in its pronouncement of some of my artistic investments. The question of religious social form and how it is embedded within the history of art demonstrates more profoundly that an object, like the cross, can both say so much and hide so much about people’s deepest intentions, dogmas, and alliances. I wanted to demonstrate that my belief in form-making is as deep as my belief in believing.’

The unmissable show is complemented by 'Vestment', an exhibition of new tar paintings by Gates at Gagosian Gallery's uptown space. In this series, the artist explores religious iconography as politically galvanising devices, while exploring spiritual and stylistic hierarchies and the symbolism and universalism of nationhood. Experimental in colour and made using roofing techniques in homage to Gates' father's profession as a roofer, this new body of work looks back as much as it looks forward.

‘Theaster Gates: Young Lords and Their Traces’, until 5 February 2023, New Museum, New York. newmuseum.org, theastergates.com

‘Theaster Gates: Vestment’, 11 November–23 December 2022 Gagosian. 976 Madison Avenue, New York. gagosian.com