Theaster Gates: artist, cultural resuscitator

For New Egypt Sanctuary of the Holy Word and Image, 2017, Theaster Gates and his studio took decades’ worth of discarded Ebony magazines and reenvisioned them as sculpture, painstakingly sorting and colour-coding thousands of issues and enshrining them in towering wooden shelves.

“Neglected objects, given form, create this kind of new anthem of Black possibility,” Gates explained, where with the proper investment of time, labour and care, the seemingly undesirable can become desirable again. After seeing New Egypt, he said, the publisher who had thrown these magazines away suddenly wanted them back.

On view now in ‘The Gift and the Renege,’ Gates’ solo exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston on view until 20th October, New Egypt is emblematic of what Gates does. He collects the materials of Black history that no longer have a home; laboriously dusts them off and sorts them out; and makes them nice in ways that reaffirm their value.

Also on view is Retaining Wall of Revolution and Resurrection, 2017, an ever-expanding archive that began with a former immigrant-owned Chicago hardware store that Gates bought in 2014. Inside rows and stacks of monumental steel cages, he preserved the storefront’s legacy in the form of assemblage, neatly organising its remaining inventory by colour or function. The overhead light fixtures are still on, and a box fan is still running, which for Gates challenges the notion that old tools have no use in the present.

“The lights still work,” he told Plaster. In the ongoing project of Black determinism, “If we were to just pull things out of our basements and our living rooms, we’d realise we have the tools we need to figure the damn thing out.”

Recently expanded to include bricks newly pressed from Houston soil, Retaining Wall alludes to a much larger project in the works. In the tradition of artist-designed chapels like Mark Rothko’s in Houston or Ellsworth Kelly’s in Austin, Gates is slated to erect one of his own: a shrine to the bricks of Freedmen’s Town, an area of Houston founded by formerly enslaved Black Americans in 1865. Following emancipation, they migrated to a flood-prone area of Houston and diligently worked to make the uninhabitable habitable, paving the roads they built with the bricks they made. The bricks survive as a testament to their makers’ resilience, as well as a point of contention for Houston City Council.

After various excavations resulted in the damage or loss of these bricks, local residents in recent years have refused construction on their roads entirely, including necessary upgrades and repairs. When the local nonprofit Houston Freedmen’s Town Conservancy partnered with CAMH, “The city came to us and said, ‘We’d like to develop a plan for the preservation of these brick streets. Do you think that artists play a role in that?’” The museum then turned to Gates, an artist who had made an art form of historical preservation, who then began a dialogue with local constituent groups.

The task at hand was to rebuild Freedmen’s Town’s trust in a city that had inflicted decades of “reneging gestures,” Gates said, referring back to the exhibition title; these gestures include property seizures through eminent domain, redlining and general disinvestment. He invited Charonda Johnson, a fifth-generation resident and honorary mayor of Freedmen’s Town to visit him in Chicago, where his Stony Island Arts Bank, an abandoned Southside building he bought and restored himself, houses the various archives entrusted to his care. When Johnson saw the surrounding neighbourhood was still home to Black businesses and had not been gentrified with yoga studios and coffee shops, “I was sold,” she said. “I said sign Freedmen’s Town up.”

“We have a responsibility to protect our generational understanding of self-determinism,” Gates said, where objects are often embedded with history. “The container is so important as a place to hold our memories, our frustrations, and our prayers.” So far the details of his project are still in their nascent stages. During a panel discussion at the museum, he described his plan to fundraise $6 or $7 million to build a Freedmen’s Town chapel, where the bricks would be stored during construction projects until they’re reinstalled. One audience member questioned the value of art in lieu of reparations – she sounded unconvinced.

Gates described the chapel as a starting point in a much larger “city-wide racial reconciliation,” and clarified that the role of art is different from that of government. “It’s not the job of the artist to change Freedmen’s Town,” he said. “That is the job of the state of Texas. But what an artist can do is build an environment where we are more compelled by the problem…to amplify the truth of humanity, so that people are compelled to love each other more.”