Sub-Rural #56, Theaster Gates

It’s remarkable that ”Unto Thee,” Theaster Gates’ new show at the Smart Museum is the first significant institutional survey of the artist’s work in Chicago. The artist literally and figuratively unpacked a three-decade project that united a wide swath of autobiographical history and cultural affairs on the southside. The works accompanied his perspective on local industry, education, economic theory, and post-ruralism among the sometimes expendable, curatorial mechanics of global art discourse. Gates is well known for digging deep, injecting personal history, objects, and anecdote farther than the ordinary considerations and parameters of Western art theory and practice.

                          Theaster Gates, 2026-01-30, Photo by Lyndon French

Gates incorporates design, music, and collected/repurposed media in a finely tuned hybrid practice. His humanist artworld conscience allows art history and production to be described with issues once considered external to common museum experience. He extends labor and art traditions by reorganizing and re-contextualizing art spaces and objects, as well as developing fresh physical, psychological, and social rationale for doing so. His website is clear. “Foundational to Gates’ practice is his custodianship and critical redeployment of culturally significant Black objects, archives, and spaces.”

For more than 30 years Gates has directed his attention to  conceptual investigations of discarded objects and forgotten places, occasionally advancing pluralism and Art-povera inspired perception and performance. He’s also sponsored interdisciplinary projects that explored skills once substantial to the breadth and situatedness of Black and working class narratives.. From his archival developments on the city’s southside he’s not only been extremely successful funding constructions of what is beautiful and natural but posits an alternative visual episteme that exploits interdisciplinary models for overlapping underserved audiences. Gates’ project like other significant artists of color of his generation is not about designating Black art as an alternative but as an overlapping aesthetic production that exists in addition, rather than on the periphery of the canon.

Gates is resolute about de-curating and re-appraising capital, whether it be it artifact or property. He re-thinks bodies of art knowledge through the kind of collected works ordinariy pre-selected by museologists, extolled by historians, catalogued by librarians, and made fuzzy by theorists. Art collections, however are not risk averse. Groups of artworks can be fetishized,  difficult to follow, and hard to argue with. Collecting can detach the sacred, form lingual biases, and creates unnecessary figurative interrogation. Collections exist somewhere between the digital and the analogue, and can short circuit macro spaces between objects and signs. They suffer from inertia, without Gates’ measure of visual harmonics that plot ‘brave new”overlapping narratives.

Gathering, organizing, and explaining one’s affinity for the immediate environment, while linked with a scholarly cultural framework, is a rare convention for artists, but not for writers or musicians whose audiences are more informed by language and thus less critically disposed. Vision and optics consume real spaces and are harder to interrogate. Gates’ place investment, however, is designed to encourage viewers’ own research path in radically creative urban settings.

Chicago’s independent  history of art, architecture, and urban planning and Gates’ hierarchy of building acquisition and neighborhood intervention are narratives uncommonly ambitious and determined. His respect for place is devout, not just contemplative, but confirmed by enterprise projects like the Dorchester Art & Housing Collective and Industries designed to produce more socially engaged generations of artists and entrepreneurs in the vicinity. He makes work for the inhabitants of his neighborhood as much as for patrons and other artists. He endorses his immediate environment by performing for, and learning from, others in an ecosystem of labor exchange and respect. It promotes an art dialogue with the fabrication of utilitarian objects that value aesthetics not ordinarily grasped by the art market.

Many of “Unto Thee’s” galleries are devoted to thousands of projected images and videos, particularly ones of classic Asian and African art donated to Gates from the former Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago where the artist is a Professor in the Department of Art. They were gifted, in part, due to the artist’s study of ceramics and his mindfulness of Buddhist philosophy with its reverence for cultural objects that embody spirits or provide meditative portals. His fidelity to craft is derived from a range of ethnographic traditions and countries, Japan being a significant influencer.

But the most imposing museum installation is also the entrance to the exhibition. “African Still Life #3, A Tribute to Patrick Mccoy and Marva Jolly” is assembled from over 1200 sq. ft. of his African Art collection, consisting of more than 1300 ritual and commemorative objects such as masks, figures, and vessels assembled into a colossal repository. It includes fragments of architectural details, tools, and furniture and supplemented by thousands of African, Caribbean, ska, jazz, and reggae recordings which are spun periodically by guest DJs. This grid of anthropological treasure rests on a metal structure that demonstrates the extent to which Gates  obliges multinational and historically flexible epic narratives.

The titanic installation contains scores of partitions filled with examples of ancestral figures and their possessions. Its sprawling steel scaffold is abundant with freight and receptacle, a cross between cargo ship, basilica altar, and Doric temple. Contents derive from both domestic and consecrated domains and a mythic tone humanizes the grid’s frosty engineering. The assemblage also queries the stillness of other museum collections whose works main identity is their provenance. There are shades of confiscation and interment in Gates’ cellular architecture but their freestyle arrangement facilitates the technology and de-liberative scope of his mega-curatorarialism .

The subtext of “Unto Thee” encompasses context and storage, a situation Gates labors over in his Kimbark Studio Complex by improvising on objects archivally. “African Still Life #3” is a massive compilation, one usually available to curators and preparators in crowded backrooms. But here scale is at issue along with a compendium of music, and a sanctuary of artifacts secured by a phalanx of carved chieftains. The installation is a temple but it’s metaphorically sensitive and illusive. It’s also a vessel –  not a slave or ghost ship, but one with timeless cargo that arrived in Chicago via Equatorial Africa – a scopic ruin awaiting further analysis, crowned by a frieze of dancing spirits ascending to Gates’ sublime Afro-utopian plane.

“Unto Thee” was co-curated by Smart Director Vanja Malloy and curator Galina Mardilovich  “Unto Thee” closes on February 22^nd. “African Still Life # 3” will be on view through July.