Theaster Gates

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0:30Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which some of the world's leading artistic figures choose the most significant influences and experiences that inspired their own creativity. I'm John Wilson, and my guest in this episode is the internationally acclaimed and hugely influential artist Theaster Gates. Born, raised and still working in Chicago, he's best known for redeveloping derelict buildings for community projects, using art to transform run-down neighbourhoods of his city. He trained as a ceramicist and still makes pottery, but is just one part of a diverse artistic output that also includes painting, sculpture and vast installations in works which often explore the black experience in contemporary America.

1:12Theaster Gates is part of the creative team behind the Barack Obama Presidential Centre, which is currently under construction in Chicago. In 2022, he created the annual Serpentine Pavilion in London, a piece called Black Chapel, which was conceived as a monument to his father. We met recently when he returned to London for the opening of a new exhibition of his work at White Cube Gallery.

1:38Theaster Gates, welcome to This Cultural Life. It's so good to be here. You're an artist known for large-scale installation pieces, but a lot of what you do would stretch the definition of what many people might consider art. You work as a social activist, you work as an urban planner. How would you describe what you do? I probably wouldn't even call myself a social artist. I would say artists have baked into our DNA awareness and sensitivity of the things happening around us. And sometimes I can't help but make in response to the world around me. So you work in various different forms, but the word artist is the good catch-all.

2:21That covers all the bases. That's right. I like wood and metal and clay, but I also like people. And I like knowing that the conditions of people are changed as a result of me being in their lives and that I'm changed as a result of being in theirs. You were born and raised in Chicago. You still live and work in Chicago. How important is the city of Chicago to your work? Chicago is very important. When I was faced with should I go to a bigger city or a city more known for the arts, Chicago was a place that was like it was an affordable, gritty, rough place where there was so much dynamism and so much affordability that I could grow and bloom, let's say, in the shadows of the art world.

3:04and so my maturing was a little bit slower but I had space and space allowed me to do more. You get more bang for your buck. More bang for your buck. In Chicago. Because of course, I mean the obvious thing when you're an up and coming artist in an American city is to think I've got to go to New York or Los Angeles. That's right. You never considered that then? I did in fact consider LA and New York but every time I thought about it the rents of the places and the idea that I would be so far away from the creativity and the community that I built it just made it seem like wasted resources to go somewhere else.

3:38So I stayed home, and over time I felt like I developed kind of a politic of staying.

3:49On This Cultural Life, my guests choose the most significant influences and experiences which have inspired their own creativity. And in the notes that you sent us, you talked about the influence, first and foremost, of your mum and your dad. You were the youngest, I think, of nine children. So set the scene. What was home life like? My mum and dad bought a four-unit apartment building before I was born. The older siblings, some had already moved out of the apartment building because there were so many of us, and then some had occupied apartments with their husbands because I have eight older sisters.

4:27And then others, we all lived with my mum and dad, you know, together. And so it was like having nine moms, you know, and they were all very loving. And my dad was kind of a practical, hardworking guy. My mom was like a spiritual saint. And between them and my sisters, I feel like I was surrounded in a house of love. Sorry, you're child number nine, but there have been eight sisters before you. Well, I was a surprise to everyone because I was seven years later than my youngest sister. They definitely stopped after me. So I feel quite lucky. And you say your father was very hardworking. He was a roofer, wasn't he?

5:09Practically, what was the day-to-day job? You know, my dad was a serial entrepreneur. Earlier in his life, he had a job making motors and building engines. But during my childhood, roofing was the thing that he was doing the most. in some light carpentry alongside the ownership and management of a cluster of small houses in our neighbourhood. So he was multi-skilled then? He was multi-skilled and I think that black men in the 60s and 70s had to find creative ways to keep themselves employed because it was a little bit just after certain kinds of factory works were going away that had been available more in the 40s and 50s.

5:51And did you go to work with him? I'm thinking specifically about when he was working on the roofs. Yeah. I mean, how much of his job did you see firsthand and soak up? He didn't really believe in an allowance. He believed that people should work for the money that they get. So I feel like I've been working from 12, but I was probably useless at 12. But at least it was the idea that I could work a little and make some money that made him feel better about giving me the money. And I think over time, that virtue or that value of kind of working hard for the things that you have was something that was firmly planted in me.

6:27The work ethic is still so important, isn't it? I think so, yeah. Did he regard his work as creative in any way? He didn't in any way imagine that roofing was creative. And in fact, when I told him later that I wanted to come back to this vocation as part of my artistic practice, he said, you know, I did this roofing so that you would never have to do this. You know, we send you the school and we try to get you educated. and then after all of that schooling, you come back to wanting to use hot tar as your creative practice. Don't do it. Let's just explore that a bit more because from what I understand, after he retired, he bequeathed you his tools and most importantly, his tar kettle.

7:09He cooked up this black bitumen in this kettle and then later you persuaded him to collaborate on a series of your tar paintings. Those canvases, large-scale canvases painted with that thick bitumen. So he was there with the brush, was he, helping you? Yeah, so it feels important to say that roofing, as I was growing up, there was nothing glorious about it. It smells horrible. It's extremely toxic. It's tough on the body. Slinging a 40 to 50 pound mop around a roof is very hard work. But when my dad had retired and my mom was near death, she asked that I find a way to reconcile my relationship with my dad and really honor him.

7:56That was her word. So I thought, well, how can I honor this man when the only thing that he values is work? And I said, OK, I'll pull him out of retirement and I'll try to get him to make some tar paintings as a kind of last hurrah where I'm leading the ship, not him. The paintings themselves would become a kind of honorific moment. You used to be his assistant. Now he's yours. Now he's mine. And I remember when I asked him, I said, Dad, I'd like you to make some tar paintings with me. He said, what would my pay be? And I said, your pay is going to be the same pay that mine was. $75 a day. And for$75 a day, my dad came and he worked as hard as he did before he retired.

8:39And he gave me the best artistic advice from just practical decisions around painting. Like he would say, if you're making a roof, you should make it so that it doesn't leak. Same should be true of your paintings. So let's cut the corners so that the corners could never leak. Let's put a drip edge and a gravel stop at the bottom so that water can be removed in the same way that you would on a roof. And it sounded like he was giving me art formalism 101, like pick a vocabulary and play the vocabulary out all the way. So he wanted me to make paintings that would not leak. They're paintings that would have served a practical purpose if they had been lined up on a roof and they could have stopped the water getting in.

9:29But that's not the point, is it? It's about the attention to detail, I guess. It was about the attention to detail. And I think my dad understood that artists can sometimes look for shortcuts. And he was convincing me that if I were to continue to live the life as a craftsman, that I might make a better formal painting. Did he like the works? He did not like the work. I don't mean the process of making the work. Did he like the finished paintings? Oh, he did not like the finished paintings. He liked the process. Did he not appreciate them as works of art? Did he say, what's the point of this? Because actually they're not up on a roof protecting a building.

10:09They're just there to be looked at. I think it was difficult for him to overcome stigma that no matter how precise we made these formal paintings, it was a constant reminder that he had to spend days on a roof and he didn't have the luxury of making a painting he had the burden of ensuring that the roof never leaked and for him it was just labor you know and there was the tremendous fear for a craftsman that you know if you give a 10-year warranty you don't want to be back on someone's roof every three months you know when it rains. And so he was really committed to trying to be a fixed man in a neighborhood where there were very few resources.

10:55And how would you characterize that neighborhood when you were growing up at the time? The West Side was, you know, I would almost say it would be like it was war-torn. The kind of heroin and crack epidemics of the 1980s and early 90s left people bereft. The redlining of the 1950s and 60s, the lack of investment by banks and the federal government left people bereft. The loss of manufacturing jobs and factory jobs by the 70s and 80s, people had lost hope. As a result of the lack of opportunity and the loss of dignity, you find yourself moving toward the bottle or the pipe or abuse at home. And all of those things were true.

11:44And I think that for my family, maybe where my mom was the kind of saving grace, was that she always had a moral fortitude and a social fortitude. and so her love was a kind of anchor against the truth of all of these violences and challenges but you know among those things there was also resilient culture great music generous people another kind of abundance that was forced to happen as a result of all of the catastrophe and your mother was a school teacher wasn't she my mom was a nursery school teacher right so So somebody right at the heart of the community. Right at the heart. And what are the values that she instilled in you, which do you think have been so important in your life and your work?

12:35My mom. My mom would always say, put God first. And I think what she meant by that was that there are my personal needs, and then there's the truth of the world's needs, the truth that you're a person that lives in the world and that some part of it should be about you and some part of it should be about something greater than you. This is really interesting, the way you're talking about your mother and your father, your father there at the heart of the community, maintaining the fabric of the community. And your mother is a sort of spiritual maintenance that you're talking about as well. That's exactly right.

13:09I imagine my mom governed the heavens and my dad governed the earth. And the roofs. Yeah.

13:20your next choice for this cultural life theaster gates is your experience of being bused to a school outside your home neighborhood so where did you go to school i lived in a neighborhood called east garfield park and then i was bused to frank w riley elementary school was a middle school about 45 minutes to one hour north of where I lived. And every day at 630, a bus would come and take me to school. And before school started, either I was playing a sport or I was in the gospel choir. But that experience of going from the west side to the far north side was a very important one. Riley Elementary was probably 80 % white, 5 % Hispanic, and the rest were black kids like me from the hood who had done very, very well on what we call the Iowa test scores.

14:19So you'd been picked to go to the school? I'd been picked. These magnet schools were taking the best and brightest from black and brown communities and bringing them to white schools where the kids were smart, normal, But then they were getting the best black and brown kids, which made the averages in those white schools higher, which meant that those schools got more money from the state. That was the underlying social policy, do you think? Absolutely. Maybe the top 20 percent of black students, we were leaving our local school. And by leaving our local school, it meant that the average grade and the average attendance dropped tremendously.

15:03Tremendously. In the school that you'd left? Yes. So it looked like black and brown schools were underperforming when in fact we were helping white schools overperform. They were creaming off then? Yeah, they were creaming off. Were you aware at the time that you were playing a part in some kind of social policy? Not at all. I was happy to go to a school that would ensure that I could get into a better high school. There are lots of implications to being bused. I had challenges of being different and having cultural differences from the people that I was around. But I had to kind of get a thick skin sooner in order to survive in that environment.

15:43How was it presented to you, though, at the time? And what was the reason you were given that you were having to drive 45 minutes to school every day? It was considered an opportunity. Hey, look at this great opportunity to go from your neighborhood school to a school where you might be challenged a bit more, where you're going to have access to like greater learning, where the learning curve is going to be a little bit steeper, but it's aligned with the fact that you've already been excelling in math and reading and comprehension. And that seemed like a good thing. And if you have a stigma of being in the hood, then maybe when you have an opportunity to go to a white school, it's like some kind of an ascension.

16:22And I think at fourth grade, I understood that this opportunity to be in an all-white school was a privilege. It was a privilege that if I didn't take it, maybe my outcomes wouldn't be as good if I stayed at my local school. And do you think they would have done? Where would Theaster Gates be now if you'd stayed at that local school? Would you have had the opportunity to go to college, to become an urban planner, to then have a life as an artist, do you think? I don't think the opportunities would have been the same, to be honest. So you must have very mixed feelings about that. Absolutely. You know, but this is the kind of the complexity that one lives with.

17:00And I think that when I'm making exhibitions, it's not like one is absolutely right and the other is absolutely wrong. But you live in this meld and you have to try to make sense of it. So I think my entire practice is muddying the truth that am I glad that I went to Riley so that then I went to a great high school that then allowed me to matriculate more easily? I'm absolutely happy. Do I have mixed feelings that I left my friends every day and that every year that I progressed, I could see that their lives were going in one direction and mine was going in a different? That's really complicated.

17:41Would I have loved for the resources that I had access to at Riley to be available at Richard Wright Elementary, my local school? I wish we had second languages. I wish we had computer technology. I wish we had after school programs that would build deeper camaraderie and keep us away from the gangs. And what about the art education? What sort of arts? Yeah, I went to a technical high school that allowed me to learn drawing and perspective and participate in choir and band. Was there a sort of cultural education program? Absolutely. And those were things that were just not afforded at my local elementary school.

18:22Did you have ambitions to become an artist at an early age? Not at all. Not at all. I knew that I was good at writing and math, but I had no idea that the visual arts would become as important as they've become in my life. You are as much a social activist in a way as you are an artist. And you're well known for having bought up a whole lot of derelict properties in Chicago and transforming them into creative spaces and art centers. In 2015, you gave a TED Talk outlining how you transformed these buildings to help regenerate the whole neighbourhood. Once I bought the building for about$18 ,000, I didn't have any money left.

19:05So I started sweeping the building as a kind of performance. And people would come over and I'd start sweeping, because the broom was free and sweeping was free. It worked out. But we would use the building then to stage exhibitions, small dinners and we found that that building on my block Dorchester we now refer to the block as Dorchester Projects that in a way as a young planner I always had a kind of critique of my vocation that we were too passive in our approach to planning and you should just point out you were actually working as an urban planner after you left college I was you'd studied urban I was And I really believe that planners help to shape the policy that determines how our cities look and feel, but who benefits in our cities.

19:55And I thought maybe there's a way that I could take the tools of planning and use them not through the bureaucracy or city government, but as a kind of citizen. And with resources that I would raise and grow, I could try to find ways to make my neighborhood a little bit better. The neighborhood that I moved to in 2006 was an area called Grand Crossing. It was on the south side of Chicago. I moved into a one-story building that was not the most attractive building on the block, but it was what I could afford. And I immediately just started trying to do small tactical projects that would help make life a little bit better for my neighbors and I.

20:37And starting off on a very practical basis by just patching up buildings, cleaning them up, stripping them back to the basics. And then my neighbours had difficulties with their building. We would help just clean and clean the alleys, mow the lawns. And some of these buildings were derelict and just abandoned, so you're picking them up for nothing. Yeah, so by 2008, the housing market crashed. And on my block, half the housing stock was available. and so I tried to take my planning skills, learn as much as I could about development and with an artist hand started renovation and then inviting friends to help me, to use the buildings with me.

21:18So what are these buildings individually? What are they housing? Just give us a sense of the range of cultural endeavour. So we have a building that we call the Listening House. We make music there. We have a building that we call the Archive House. And when our archive was small, we held our archive there, but we outgrew it. We have a space called Black Cinema House where we show films. And then we have, you know, spaces where artists can live and work. And then we've just finished a school called St. Lawrence. And St. Lawrence is a 40 ,000 square foot, a Wii U square feet, sorry, a 40 ,000 square foot school that shuttered probably 25 years ago.

22:03And that school will be a space for like helping artists who are already good become better. And you should just explain also how those individual buildings were being transformed with cultural objects, artifacts and collections. They became repositories, didn't they? Yeah, like after I would finish the building, I kind of asked myself like, what should happen in it? And alongside the buildings being available, I found that there was so much rich cultural stuff, you know, like friends who had libraries or archives that were available, you know. So you were collecting collections then? I was collecting collections.

22:44And it was possible to care for a set of things in a space because the spaces were much more affordable on the south side. So as I was renovating a building that we call the Stony Island Arts Bank, which is kind of my biggest project and the most beloved in Chicago, a dear friend of mine, Linda Johnson Rice, she was the heiress of a company, Johnson Publishing Company, that made the Ebony and Jet magazines along with other periodicals. and the company was sunsetting and Linda said oh it looks like you really like books I have a lot of books she was going out the family firm was going out of business that's right and the library had I believe the number was 26 ,000 books and so the books and the shelving and and other cultural artifacts eventually the furniture of Johnson Publishing she just allowed me to become the kind of steward of her family's material legacy.

23:51And the legacy being Johnson Publishing being the primary publisher of magazines, periodicals, specifically for African-American readership. That's right. You know, Johnson has an amazing story because he understood that news had the capacity to have bias. In the 50s, if there was a riot in Oklahoma, it was being told from, let's say, a conservative white position. The way that they articulated that riot was different from the way that a Black person would experience the riot on the ground. And so he built a kind of parallel publication for African Americans that could tell another story of America on the ground, documenting an alternative narrative of truth about the challenges that black people experienced in the United States.

24:43So otherwise that library and the collection, I presume there were thousands of magazines as well that you took on. Yes. They would just possibly have been polped. Yes. I'd like to imagine that maybe they would have been donated and scattered. Another 10 years has gone by since you gave that TED Talk, which is very much a sort of landmark, because it sort of awakened people to what you had been doing in Chicago. and how's it changed since then? How has it developed? Well, the block is beautiful now. The buildings are more active than they've been. The violence immediately around the block has lessened.

25:17So there's a long-term legacy already that you can see. But I think there's still a lot of work to do. The work still feels like a drop in the bucket relative to the need and the urgency of change. but I think what my drop in the bucket did was it it raised the alarm that normal people like me artists like many of us creative people can play a role in the significant transformation of their neighborhoods and as a result they could touch lots of lives not only in the museums or galleries which I love but also on regular streets and in their neighborhood and do you see all of this work as part of your artistic practice?

26:03Or are these offshoots from the main job of being the potter, the ceramicist, the painter? It's a complementary work to my practice. My primary work is to make art and then to use the platform that I have access to to create as much opportunity not only for myself but for others.

26:29your next choice is going to japan to study traditional ceramic techniques so what led you to japan so okay in undergrad i was a community and regional planning major and then i developed two minors one in religious studies the other in sculpture My ceramic instructor in sculpture, Ingrid Lilligren, she did the best she could, but I was a horrible potter. But I kept trying. Yeah, but what started you on pottery in the first place? I needed to take a design elective in the community and regional planning program. Ah, that's the opportunities offered by the American University. Exactly. It's unthinkable in Britain.