‘Keep working’
Theaster Gates responds to a turbulent moment in the U.S.
Artist Theaster Gates likes to refer to himself as a potter. But the onetime urban planning student is best known for his social practice work on the South Side of Chicago.
There, he’s transformed neglected buildings into centers of culture, from a space that screens African American-themed films to a still graceful neoclassical bank (sold to him for $1 by Mayor Rahm Emanuel) that now maintains a vast library of historic black publications accessed by scholars and even musicians, including Corinne Bailey Rae and Meshell Ndegeocello.
This gives him a nuanced perspective on crime, education and neighborhoods that many, including the new president, don’t see.
“I think that what Trump is indicating is that he’s unwilling to look at the preconditions that created this thing — from segregation to the lack of equity and job opportunities to schooling and healthcare,” Gates says when asked about Trump’s tweet promising to “send in the Feds” if the “horrible ‘carnage’ ” of Chicago’s shootings and killings doesn’t stop. “My nephew in Chicago can get arrested for five years for marijuana, and a white man in Aspen, Colo., can make millions selling it.”
Gates’ art, seen at Milan’s Fondazione Prada, New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, often starts with materials harvested from reclaimed spaces.
Now Gates has returned to L.A. with “But to Be a Poor Race,” an exhibition inspired by Jet magazines from his Stony Island Arts Bank collection and curious charts from sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois mapping black life in the U.S.
Du Bois’ charts, made with Atlanta University students in 1900, examined urban migration and taxable property owned by African Americans. These early infographics, intended for a Paris exhibition about African American life, were more than simple data sets. Du Bois interpreted them as fantastical paintings, with whorls of bold color. (Imagine Kandinsky as a statistician.)
Using Du Bois’ designs, Gates created new paintings and installation objects for the show at Hollywood’s Regen Projects. It’s his first solo exhibition at Regen, which now represents Gates exclusively in the U.S.
How did you come across Du Bois’ statistical charts?
I was asked to make a work responding to Du Bois. I decided [to] take portions of one of his speeches, and improvise my own speech so that I was, in a way, channeling Du Bois. In doing that research, I came across these statistical drawings and they were so unbelievable.
What struck you about them?
I realized that he was teaching [his students] art as he was teaching them statistical mapping. He was talking about how people were moving to cities and owning land and implements, mapping black asset ownership, and he could do this empirical work with such flair. Du Bois was maybe one of the earliest black contemporary artists.
In your paintings, you replicate Du Bois’ color fields, but not their context. Why strip the data away?
This is where my conversation with abstraction begins. Taking the information away, I get to create an abstraction that makes people think about data: “A black man with a show about data? That must be about killings.”
People [can] imagine their own content — they can layer themselves upon my abstractions. It’s a commitment to painting, too. It’s the way that [Mark] Rothko or Romare Bearden would have talked about abstraction: “The world is too complicated or too ugly — I don’t have to represent the war. I don’t have to represent that verbatim.” My job is to show people a possibility. If we have a willingness to look at this statistical drawing, we might ask, what could change? What else is possible?
What makes these pieces significant in this political climate?
The show was intentionally not wearing politics on its sleeve. It’s simply responding to the energy of this moment. For me, on the South Side and the West Side of Chicago, whether it’s the last political moment or this one, it’s hard to say that the poorest in America benefited or lost anything from either. Really, the anxiety is in the middle. What I realized is that this is a demonstration, this is an opportunity that one has to keep going to work — you gotta keep working. The show says, “I am going to continue to go to work. I’m going to continue to make art. I’m going to continue to sing. I’m going to keep working as a protest.”
A number of sculptures use old Jet magazines. How did they end up in your hands?
Linda Johnson Rice, the CEO of Johnson Publishing [which published Jet], she came to my home . . . saw that I had a lot of books and said, “I have some books — my father’s books. Why don’t you come to our building and check ’em out?” So I went to Johnson Publishing and the seventh floor was their library with 26,000 books. I said, “Yeah, I would love these books.” She said, “You can have them.”
I had just acquired a bank and the bank’s principal mission would be to activate and give a life to these books that hadn’t really been seen by the public.
She also gave me the bound periodicals that consisted of the entire canon of Johnson Publishing: Jet, as well as Black World and Negro Digest, Ebony, Ebony Jr. and Tan, a magazine for lighter-skinned women. They produced over 26 publications. Negro Digest is like a black intellectual journal. John Johnson [Johnson Publishing’s founder] was commissioning the only black PhDs from Harvard and Yale. The young Richard Wright was making essays for Jet and Ebony in 1951 or ’52.
Why are these publications so important to you?
I thought John Johnson was one of the most significant early black entrepreneurs, especially around publishing and the black image. He was doing something that advanced black people in a way that made good business sense. He was the man.
For this show, you’ve written poems on the spines of Jet: “Not only pentatonic / Black Harmonics / Gallowed / Clay Body / Dark and Lovely / Fabulaxer.” I’d love to know how you ended up with “pentatonic” and “Fabulaxer” in a single poem.
My poem is a kind of a black index to the content inside each bound volume. I would simply peruse through each bound volume, kind of waiting for information to pop out at me. In a way I’m making concrete poetry, but my field is 2 1⁄2 to 3 inches — that’s all the space I got. Fabulaxer was a black woman’s perm relaxer. People talk about the fact that I like found things. But it’s not “found” things I’m preoccupied with. It’s that as people become more middle class, they become less interested in using words like “Fabulaxer.” I’m exhuming language. I’m trying to make it high language so that we’re not afraid to use these words.
I understand that you were inspired by important Southern California ceramicists?
My undergraduate ceramics teacher Ingrid Lilligren, my only formal art teacher, took the entire class to Los Angeles — it was ’93 or ’94 — and I stayed at the Brewery [ artist studio complex]. And that was the thing that made me want to study art. Up until then I was an urban planning student.
[Ingrid] studied under [Paul] Soldner and she knew all of those ceramics guys — like Akio Takamori, God rest his soul. It was there that I learned about the world of ceramics — and that led me to Africa, to India and, ultimately, I studied in Japan.
I met Soldner once. And I saw [Peter] Voulkos throwing from a stage. I was really impressed by these kind of conceptual uses of craft. I don’t call it “ceramics.” I talk about the material. I’m a clay artist.
carolina.miranda@latimes.com