‘Emotional And Critical Depth’ Of Theaster Gates Over Two Decades Amplified By New Museum Retrospective And Phaidon

A four-foot-eight-inch tall sculpture made of bronze and tar stands up against normative Eurocentric interpretations of faith, race, and femininity, and exudes political, mystical, and metaphorical power.

Theaster Gates spent three years preparing for his 2018 exhibition Black Madonna at Kunstmuseum Basel and Sprengel Museum in Hanover, Germany, thinking about Black women, Black female power, and the role women in general perform in relationship to the systems of power and control. His depiction of the Virgin Mary directly confronts the continent’s history. Most Catholic and Ortthodox Christian renderings of the Virgin Mary with dark skin were made between the eleventh century and the fifteenth century, with some 500 existing in Europe,

Using tar draws us back to Gates’ father, who owned a roofing company and gave the artist his tar kettle when he retired. The black viscous liquid also forces us to acknowledge racist history.

Every aspect, every detail, of Gates’ meticulous practice – from the salvaged materials to the archival histories – underscores his painstaking process of building knowledge with objects, images, sounds, movements, and most significantly, through human interactions.

Black Madonna investigates the fungible spaces between life on earth and life beyond earthly existence. Gates considers how Black liberation theology seeks to free people of color from social injustice on earth, rather than in the afterlife.

The first New York museum survey exhibition devoted to the Chicago-based multimedia artist opens today at the New Museum and is on view through February 5, 2023. Curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director and Gary Carrion-Murayari, Kraus Family Curator at the New Museum, Theaster Gates: Young Lords and Their Traces is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog by the same name. Co-published by the museum and Phaidon, the book features new essays by Jessica Bell Brown (curator and head of contemporary art at the Baltimore Museum of Art), Gary Carrion-Murayari (Kraus Family Curator at the New Museum), Ryan Dohoney (Associate Professor of Musicology in the Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University), Coco Fusco (an interdisciplinary artist and writer based in New York), Dieter Roelstraete (curator at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago), and an interview between Gates and Gioni.

The exhibition and book explore Gates’s fluidity and agility across sculptures, paintings, videos, interdisciplinary performance, social practice, and archiving. In the early 2000s, Gates began using salvaged materials and exhaustively researched interdisciplinary histories to inform his singular sculptural practice.

Taking over the entire museum, the exhibition showcases artworks produced over the past two decades and site-specific environments created by Grates to contextualize his archival collections. The title is an homage to the revolutionary and visionary minds who have made a profound impact on his home city of Chicago and the United States.

The 280-page hardcover book, featuring 200 illustrations, is available for pre-order and will ship on January 4, 2023.

My experience viewing, feeling, and hearing Gates’ large-scale installations is informed by Tina Campt’s A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See. “Rather than writing about artworks, I spend most of my time at exhibitions and galleries sitting with and writing to them,” Campt writes.

Gates’ work demands close attention, inspection, and interaction. Allow yourself to hear and feel as well as see what he’s curated, assembled, and presented in a specific space. The experience is as emotional as it is aesthetic.