PRESENTATION: Theaster Gates -Vessels

Theaster Gates’ practice includes sculpture, installation, performance and urban interventions that aim to bridge the gap between art and life. Gates works as an artist, curator, urbanist and facilitator and his projects attempt to instigate the creation of cultural communities by acting as catalysts for social engagement that leads to political and spatial change.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Benaki Museum Archive

A group of Theaster Gates recent large-scale ceramic works is on show in the exhibition “Vessels” at Benaki Museum. Theaster Gates’ 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. 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 Museum galleries by virtue of comparison with ancient ceramic works from across the Eastern Mediterranean zone.

Theaster Gates, grew up in a working-class family on Chicago’s West Side. After earning a B.S. degree in urban planning at Iowa State University, he studied African religions at the University of Cape Town and then took up a residency with ceramics masters in Tokoname, Japan. In 2005 he returned to Iowa State to complete a multidisciplinary master’s degree in urban planning, ceramics, and religious studies. Gates’s media included ceramics, ready-mades, salvage, and the organization of multimedia, multiparticipant projects with activist themes. In his ongoing “Dorchester Projects” (2006- )—which involved the purchase of blighted properties and the renovation and repurposing of them into cultural-enrichment centres (that housed such collections as glass slides, books on art and architecture, vinyl LPs, and archived collections of Ebony and Jet magazines) in the Greater Grand Crossing neighbourhood, on Chicago’s South Side—Gates erased the boundary between life and art. His first solo art exhibition, “Plate Convergence” (2007), held at Chicago’s Hyde Park Art Center, showcased a fictional mixed-race ceramist played by an actor. Gates’s installation-performance “Temple Exercises” (2009) at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art led to an invitation to exhibit at the 2010 Whitney Biennial in New York City, where he presented shoeshine stands and displayed fire hoses as well as staging performances by his singing group, the Black Monks of Mississippi. Gates drew international acclaim in 2012 at Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany, for 12 Ballads for Huguenot House, an installation crafted of salvage materials retrieved from one of his Grand Crossing properties and a local derelict building. In 2014 he began work on an art installation that would serve as a gateway for the Chicago Transit Authority’s refurbishment of the 95th Street Red Line rapid-transit station. His two works of public art would incorporate some symbolic items—fire hoses, for example—that harkened back to the American civil rights movement. In 2006 Gates became an arts programmer at the University of Chicago, where in 2011 he was appointed director of Arts + Public Life, an incubator that linked the university and its South Side community in creative endeavours. He was also the founder (2010) of the nonprofit Rebuild Foundation, which took arts programs to public schools.

Photo: Theaster Gates, Vessel #29, 2020, Reduction fired clay body with manganese base glaze, 61 × 43.2 × 40.6 cm [24 × 17 × 16 in], © Theaster Gates, Courtesy the artist, Gagosian and Benaki Museum

Info: Benaki Museum, 1 Koumbari St. & Vas. Sofias Ave., Athens, Greece, Duration: 4/2-30/4/2022, Days & Hours: Mon, Wed, Fri-Sat 10:00-18:00, Sun 10:00-16:00, www.benaki.org