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The first monograph of Chicago-based Theaster Gates, one of the most exciting and highly regarded contemporary artists at work today. Theaster Gates has developed an expanded artistic practice that includes space development, object making, performance and critical engagement with many publics. Gates transforms spaces, institutions, traditions, and perceptions. Gates's training as an urban planner and sculptor, and subsequent time spent studying clay, has given him keen awareness of the poetics of production and systems of organizing. Playing with these poetic and systematic interests, Gates has assembled gospel choirs, formed temporary unions, and used systems of mass production as a way of...
This publication accompanies a major new exhibition of Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates (b. 1973), focussing on his clay-based work, collaborative projects and large scale sculptures and installations since 2005. Gates' interdisciplinary practice draws on his training in both urban planning and pottery, resulting in work which aims to instigate the creation of cultural communities and the recirculation of art-world capital, all the time considering the notion of Black space and ideology.0Fully illustrated with examples of pottery, sculptures, installations, films and archive materials, the book also documents a new film by Gates and features essays from leading craft historians and writers. This in-depth exploration of Gates' work is timely and relevant now in a world where a new generation are raising questions through making, identity and activism.00Exhibition: Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, UK (29.09.2021-09.01.2022).
A multidisciplinary look at the foremost archive of Black American visual culture, as recast by Theaster Gates This book features essays and other reflections commissioned in response to the Facsimile Cabinet of Women Origin Stories, a monumental participatory work by Theaster Gates (born 1973). The Cabinet includes nearly 3,000 framed images of women from the Johnson Publishing Company archive, and highlights from the collection appear in this edited volume. Founded in 1942, Chicago-based Johnson Publishing chronicled the lives of Black Americans for more than seven decades through the magazines Ebony and Jet. Composed from arguably the most important archive of American Black visual culture in the 20th century, Gates' work centers the essential and too often unsung role of women in this history. When the Cabinet was exhibited at the Colby College Museum of Art, 12 women from a wide range of disciplines (including archivists, legal scholars, anthropologists and librarians, as well as curators, visual artists, filmmakers, writers and art historians) were invited to reflect on a work that brings a sisterhood of images to light.
A book on the internationally renowned artist known for his blend of social practice, sculpture, and urban development. Gates has created a series of works that utilize bronze along with repurposed stone and wood, tar, and ceramics to explore the forms and imagery of African masks. Documentation of the works will be accompanied by images from the artist's expansive archives of anthropological slides, stills from a video performance, and a conversation between Gates and scholar Darby English.
Think Like an Artist by BBC Arts editor Will Gompertz - wisdom and smart thinking from Da Vinci to Ai Weiwei Why do some people seem to find it easy to come up with brilliant, fresh ideas? And how do they turn them into something worthwhile? Will Gompertz, the BBC's Arts Editor and a former director at the Tate, has spent years getting up close and personal with some of the world's greatest creative thinkers. And he's discovered a handful of traits that are common to all successful people, from novelists and film directors to scientists and philosophers. These basic practices allow their talent to flourish. And they can be adopted by all of us - no matter what we do in life - to unleash our ...
The work of contemporary artist Carrie Mae Weems (b. 1953) hits hard with a powerful mix of lived life and social commentary. Since the late 1970s, her photographs, films, and installations have become known for presenting realistic and authentic images of African Americans while confronting themes of race, gender, and class. This book, the first major survey of Weems's career, traces the artist's commitment to addressing issues of social justice through her artwork. Her early photographs, which focused on African American women and families, have since led to work that examines more general aspects of the African diaspora, from the legacy of slavery to the perpetuation of debilitating stereotypes. Increasingly, she has broadened her view to include global struggles for equality and justice. This beautifully illustrated book highlights over 200 of Weems's most important works. Accompanying essays by leading scholars explore Weems's interest in folklore, her focus on the spoken and written word, the performative aspect of her constructed tableaux, and her expressions of black beauty.
Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates, whose projects range from small-scale sculptures to ambitious urban interventions, investigates the transformative powers of art in this provocative book. As the force behind the much-acclaimed Stony Island Arts Bank, Gates responds creatively to the challenges of space, whether working in museums or in communities. In this instance, he explores notions of blackness, freedom, and the history of house music. Featuring works by the artist himself as well as objects drawn from the Exhibit of American Negros at the 1900 Paris Exposition, the Ed Williams collection of negrobilia, and Frankie Knuckles's vinyl collections, How to Build a Museum proposes new ways of honouring and remembering Black experience, exploring the potential of symbolic structures and their associated objects. Theaster Gates is an American social practice installation artist, who teaches in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago. His highly acclaimed work deals with issues of urban planning, religious space, and craft, and the revitalization of poor urban neighborhoods.
Gates is an artist, curator and urban activist whose work aims to galvanise communities and act as a catalyst for social change. For this exhibition, Gates created a multi-faceted installation that investigated themes of race and history through sculpture, installation, performance and two-dimensional works exhibited both inside and outside of the Bermondsey site. The exhibition furthered the artist's interest in a critique of social practice, shared economies and the question of objects in relation to political and cultural thought.
"The handmade has become inseparable from capitalist modes of production and consumption and this change demands new understandings of objects, aesthetics and labour. Drawing on a wide range of case studies of craft practice, Craft on Demand examines the role of the handmade in contemporary art, craft and design as part of a dramatically shifting global economy. New writing and artists' projects by international scholars and practitioners explore the politics of scarcity, hoarding and sustainability, craftivism and 'ethical' consumption, urban space and new technologies, race, cultural heritage and sovereignty. Engaging with craft, art, design students and practitioners who want a radical rethink of the politics and economics of the handmade, they claim craft as a dynamic critical field for thinking through the most immediate issues of our time"--
When local governments neglect public services or community priorities, how do concerned citizens respond? In The Help-Yourself City, Gordon Douglas looks closely at people who take urban planning into their own hands with homemade signs and benches, guerrilla bike lanes and more. Douglas explores the frustration, creativity, and technical expertise behind these interventions, but also the position of privilege from which they often come. Presenting a needed analysis of this growing trend from vacant lots to city planning offices, The Help-Yourself City tells a street-level story of people's relationships to their urban surroundings and the individualization of democratic responsibility.