Before he was an internationally acclaimed artist, Thiestar gates In his life, people were known as the protector of old and sacrifices. In the mid -2000s, Gates was working as an art administrator at the University of Chicago, while buying derogatory buildings from the south side of the city and turning them into artists studios or repository for their collection of books, records and photographic slides. When someone in the university had something to get rid of, he would get a call. “I was not guessing that this would be a large part of my art practice,” he remembers. “I was just a young child.”
Twenty years and many thousands of items later, Gates is a professor of visual art at the University of Chicago and a Guggenheim Fellow, and collaborated with Prada. Their work is shown-which examines black American culture in the form of mixed-media installations. National Gallery of Art in Washington, DCLondon’s Spentine Gallery in Paris, and Palais de Tokyo.
His latest exhibition, “Two You”, which opened on 23 September in the Smart Museum of Art of the University of ChicagoUnits its work with pieces from the university archives. It is also a meaningful moment: although the East Garfield Park in Gates city grew up in the neighborhood, this is his first single show in his hometown.
“I have been reflecting on what happened in the last 20 years, and surveying the materials given to me,” they say. The show title “What happens when you surrender all efforts, and remove it.”
From left: Bobby Rogers/Walker Art Center, Minoriapolis; Reconstruction foundation
The exhibition features paintings, installations, sculptures, porcelain, porcelain, porcelain and films, including vitrines from the institute to study ancient cultures. The school’s bond chapel and art-history department also have wooden puys for 72,000 glass slides, all of which were willing to Gates for years. There is also a site-specific installation of 350 African masks, preserved to Gates, which was presented with a soundtrack from the vinyl collection of the late Deenah Guyen, which is also known as DJ Natty, also known as a French-Vietnamese DJ, whose Catalog Gates was received.
Gates’ large-scale ceramic-one exercise that he honored in 2004 while studying in Toconam, a city in Central Japan-is also on watching. Japanese continues to influence the crafts gates, and recently returned to a teacher, master Seramist Ryoji Koi’s home, who died in 2020. Gates along with Koi’s daughter visited Koi’s Mountainside Studio in Gifu, who shared that her father would disintegrate in the mountain with studio. “He was not interested in protection,” says Gates.
