Theaster Gates believes in the transformative power of community--especially those relationships and creative endeavors forged among people from dissimilar backgrounds when they are presented with the opportunity.

 

Gates is a two-time graduate of Iowa State who earned his bachelor's degree in community and regional planning, with a minor in sculpture, in 1996, and then returned a decade later to complete a master's in interdisciplinary graduate studies in 2005, with a focus on planning, religious studies and public sculpture.

His education, like his professional career, has concentrated on bringing together disparate elements: in his studies he combined the more rationalistic discipline of planning with the intuition and aesthetic sensibility of the creative arts. In his professional life, he works to create ritual nexuses of community institutions with the visual and performing arts, providing opportunities for enlightenment and engagement among participants.

As the coordinator of arts programming at the University of Chicago, Gates helps develop collaborations among faculty and student organizations, and coordinates campus arts activities. But it’s the work he does off campus—as a studio artist, musician, and self-described "cultural planner"--that resonates most broadly, reaching audiences from Illinois to the Netherlands.

The planner
Paving his path to the present, Gates chose planning as a tool to effect transformation. "The choice I made to study planning arose directly from my desire to create change in neighborhoods like the one I grew up in," he said. "Areas hit hard by unemployment and urban decay, and overwhelmingly forgotten by the larger city."

After completing his bachelor's, Gates returned to his native Chicago to apply his skills.
His background in urban planning really helped him to understand how a city like Chicago works, he said. He was then able to take that knowledge and "land his creativity on it," calling himself a "cultural planner."

"It was very important to have job opportunities right out of my undergrad program that fostered creative ways of thinking about what it meant to be a planner and the functions of a planner within small and large agencies, cultural systems and political machines," Gates said.

However, Gates viewed community development not only from a planning perspective but from an artistic one. "Performance and [art] making were big, informal aspects of my life; it seemed only natural that I would use these tools as part of the conversation of transformation."

Gates spent several years overseeing arts-related projects for the Chicago Transit Authority. He later began working with many of Chicago's arts-based community organizations, among them, Little Black Pearl, an art and entrepreneurial program for youth, and the Experimental Station, a venue for sustainable practices and socially based art work.

Back at Iowa State for his graduate degree, Gates was inspired to pull together planning, religious studies and public sculpture into a "great convergence" of seemingly divergent areas. This union was born of his realization that "black churches in large cities were key centers of power that could create change in a neighborhood. I wanted to tap into the possibilities for churches to do more to create change, environmentally, socially, politically," he said.

Over time, Gates recognized that he couldn't rely on black churches alone to make an impact: he would draw on the resources of city governments, block clubs, museums and local cultural institutions; in fact, he would make himself an "institution" and use his creative capital to build community and bring about change.

At the same time, Gates was developing his own art practice, experimenting with not only traditional ceramics but also site-specific installations, social interventions and "developing hyper-real lenses for the everyday.

"My art has grown from a central interest in ceramics to convening dinners as an art form, to designing space for these dinners and performances, to looking at the role that ritual plays in how people interact," he said.

The 'convener'
Since 2007, one of Gates' primary vehicles for change has been the community dinner, a way to bring people together to explore both differences and commonalities and develop unexpected relationships.

The first such dinner, or "Plate Convergence," held at Chicago's Hyde Park Art Center, "signified a serious change in the direction of my work, from strictly object-based to formal dialogical practices that, while using things I made, would steer people back to relationship and away from my objects," Gates said.   Gates' Plate Convergence ritual involves inviting people from all backgrounds to meet at the dinner table to informally discuss issues of race, political difference and inequalities of all sorts. He convenes dinners in areas with

Gates sets the table for a community dinner at his home on Chicago's South Side.

racial and social tension with the goal of generating discussions of such tensions.

	His hope is that positive new relationships are created. Gates also uses these dinners to explore the complexity of clay and the interpersonal relationships that arise from its use. He arranges not only the tableware, but also people, to instigate conversations or "convergences" of difference. Participants eat from plank-shaped plates he has created, drawing from the Japanese tradition.
Plate Convergence exhibition at Hyde Park Art Center.	"When people eat together, a kind of intimacy is created that is a solid bed for new

understanding, even while sometimes causing great tension. This way of engaging and forging new friendships through hospitality is not a new idea, but it relies heavily on the trust I have developed with lots of different communities," Gates said. "They trust that whoever is at their table should be there.

"I often invite people who believe similar things, but because of geography or race or class, never would believe those things in the same space. I help make friends."

The artist
Another way Gates brings people together is through performance and music. He has collaborated with architects, artists and poets on projects addressing such topics as gentrification, immigration, and contemporary black identity. He recently founded the Black Monks of Mississippi, a group that blends slave spirituals, monastic chants, and jazz to create a new kind of soul music.

Gates currently is involved in "Heartland: the exhibition" at Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands (through Jan. 25), and "Theaster Gates: Temple Exercises" at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (through Feb. 1). View Temple Exercises gallery guide (.pdf)

Gates performed with the Black Monks and a group of Dutch musicians at the opening of Heartland in October 2008, and the Van Abbe purchased an edited video of the project for its permanent collection. After Eindhoven, the Heartland exhibition will travel to the University of Chicago's Smart Museum of Art, where a modified form will be shown from October 2009

through January 2010.

 

The MCA Chicago exhibition explores the relationships among art, politics and race. Gates' "Soul Temple" from the series "Tea Shack" transforms the museum's McCormick Tribune Gallery into a temple-like environment that merges aspects of African American and Japanese traditions and serves as a contemplative space meant to inspire dialogue across philosophical and cultural boundaries. It is also a performance space for the Black Monks.

The "exercises" of the exhibition’s title will include lectures, performances and conversations both at the MCA and at other locations in the city, including Little Black Pearl.

"Art should free us up to respond to the questions in our heads with whatever capacities we have," Gates said. "I am only trying to use my capacities, to keep learning. But making without thinking is no fun.

“Thinking and making together creates works that my hands or mind alone couldn’t really express.”