PRESENTATION: Theaster Gates-Black Mystic

Theaster Gates creates works that engage with space theory, land development, sculpture and performance. Drawing on his interest and training in urban planning and preservation, the artist redeems spaces that have been left behind. His work contends with the notion of Black space as a formal exercise, one defined by collective desire, artistic agency and the tactics of a pragmatist.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Archive

Employing industrial roofing materials, Theaster Gates develops tar paintings or “torch works” into monumental tapestries for his solo exhibition “Black Mystic”. Encapsulating the entirety of his tar practice, this body of work sees Gates further his ambitious experiments with drawing at the scale of a roof. He introduces a new chromatic range and compositional complexity, developing means of incorporating imagery and text into these works. Made with roofing material of bitumen-infused polyester mats known as torch down, these complex, collage-like compositions of layered and juxtaposed color bear the marks of flame and tar used to bind them together. These transformative processes are charged with significance both as vital infrastructure that usually goes unnoticed and as the artist’s familial legacy. Included in the exhibition at Le Bourget is the tar kettle that he inherited from his late father, a professional roofer. For Gates, working with tar is a means to produce art that engages with modernist abstraction as well as modes of craft and labor, while serving to commemorate his father. For the first time, Gates incorporates words into his tar paintings, using large stencils to apply them and competing with the scale of billboards. “1-800 ROOFING” is a slogan that advertises a fictive company, reinforcing the artist’s conception of art as a collective endeavor. In addition, he incorporates silkscreened imagery from the archives of the Johnson Publishing Company, the Chicago-based publisher of “Ebony” and “Jet” magazines, which Gates has preserved in their entirety through his Rebuild Foundation. The silkscreened image of a singer signifies the central role of Black music and musicians in defining American culture.

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 (begun in 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, Untitled, 2024 (detail), Industrial oil-based enamel, rubber torch down, bitumen, and steel, 144 7/8 x 389 inches (368 x 988 cm), © Theaster Gates, Photo: Thomas Lannes, Courtesy Gagosian

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 26 avenue de l’Europe, Le Bourget, France, Duration: 13-4/2024- , Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, https://gagosian.com/