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.  

Theaster Gates (b. 1973) currently lives and works in Chicago. Gates creates works that engage with space theory and land development, sculpture and performance. Drawing on his interest and training in urban planning and preservation, Gates redeems spaces that have been left behind. Known for his recirculation of art world capital, Gates’s practice focuses on the possibility of the “life within things.” 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.

Gates has received numerous awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship (2025), Crystal Award (2020), Nasher Prize (2018), the Kurt Schwitters Prize (2017), the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Award (2016), and the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award for Social Progress (2015). His work can be found in public collections worldwide, including the Menil Collection, Houston; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Tate Gallery, London; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Gates is a professor at The University of Chicago in the Department of Visual Arts and the Harris School of Public Policy.