Theaster Gates

Oh, you’ve got to come back to the city, the place where you belong
Oh, you’ve got to come back to the city, the place where you were born
Oh, you’ve got to come back to the city, the city of dreams

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   —Marvin Tate, “City Promenade”

(CHICAGO/NEW YORK – September 30, 2025) - GRAY is pleased to announce OH, YOU'VE GOT TO COME BACK TO THE CITY, a solo exhibition by Theaster Gates. The exhibition opens at GRAY Chicago with a public reception for the artist on October 16, and remains on view through December 20, 2025. This is Gates's fourth solo exhibition with GRAY.

In OH, YOU'VE GOT TO COME BACK TO THE CITY, Gates brings together a new series of tar paintings, sculpture, and installation to tell an allegory of the city in decay and the potential contained within its ruins. The exhibition’s title comes from a song by Chicago musician and poet Marvin Tate, in which the City, personified as a character, has cleaned up its act and attempts to lure its residents back from the suburbs. 

Gates’s artistic practice has engaged and reframed the cultural and material history of Chicago as material for the studio. His new installation explores the possibilities that lie within the city’s unattended corners. From his stone repository, Gates has selected a family of marble, granite, scholars’ rocks, and concrete forms that anchor a grid-like installation evoking both the planning logic of cities and the quiet order of memorials. Ceramic works and everyday artifacts rest atop each stone, suggesting the remnants left behind by former inhabitants. Surrounding the sculptural installation is a new series of tar paintings that extend Gates’s patching and bonding strategies. Both sculptural and painterly, these works represent a new direction in the series. 

In this body of work, Gates wrestles with the burden brought on by aging infrastructure to create new narratives that build on the rich metaphors embedded in his materials—as tools of resistance, signs of excess, and evidence of decline. Developed in conjunction with his exhibition Unto Thee, on view at the Smart Museum of Art through February 22, 2026, OH, YOU'VE GOT TO COME BACK TO THE CITY offers a profound reflection on Gate’s life as a craftsman, urban planner, and pedagogue.

Theaster Gates: OH, YOU'VE GOT TO COME BACK TO THE CITY opens at GRAY Chicago (2044 West Carroll Avenue) with a public reception on Thursday, October 16, from 5-7 PM, and will be on view through December 20, 2025.