Walking into the Smart Museum of Art’s latest exhibition, visitors encounter shelves filled with African art and cultural objects, drawers containing glass lantern slides, and a large slate roof displayed on the floor. Theaster Gates: Unto Thee is the first solo exhibition in Chicago for University of Chicago Professor Theaster Gates. It brings together materials he has collected over his career to examine how objects’ meanings can change over time.
“Seven core materials are part of this exhibition, all of which are connected with the University of Chicago,” said Vanja Malloy, co-curator and Dana Feitler Director of the Smart Museum.
The materials on display reflect Gates’ connection to the University and his practice of finding value in neglected or discarded items, especially those related to Black life. Some pieces in the exhibition include a slate roof made up of 9,000 tiles that once covered Rockefeller Chapel and glass vitrines previously used at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures. Catalog drawers from the art history department now house a collection of lantern slides digitized for display in a room furnished with original pews from Bond Chapel.
“These materials were seen as antiquated or no longer useful,” said Malloy, who noted that Gates calls their reuse “redemptive.”
Other works featured include tar paintings using roofing material similar to what Gates’ father used professionally and bookshelves holding Robert Bird’s 4,500-volume archive—Bird was a UChicago professor and close friend who died in 2020.
Known for installations and ceramic sculptures shown internationally, Gates has brought many items back to UChicago for this show. “When you spend so much time and care with these materials, and you return them back to the entity from which you gained them, it demonstrates what holding on to things can do,” said curator Galina Mardilovich, “how it adds more value and care.”
Unto Thee also includes two materials never before exhibited: concrete slabs from Lorado Taff Midway Studios—where artists such as Ruth Duckworth taught—and granite from building the Logan Center for the Arts. These pieces connect both UChicago’s arts history and Gates’ career at the university.
Explaining the title choice for Unto Thee, Gates said in an interview with Christina Sharpe for the exhibition catalogue: “The exhibition title Unto Thee has to do with this proposal: Is it possible that I can acknowledge these raw materials that were given to me under duress, acknowledge that during my time on Earth over the last twenty years, I’ve been a good steward of the things,” he continued, “and then can I offer those things back to the source that they came from in their new charged, energetic state?”
Gates is also known for urban renewal projects through his nonprofit Rebuild Foundation. At its recent opening event for The Land School—a former elementary school preserved as an arts center—he described saving it from demolition. Rebuild Foundation has transformed several South Side properties into community spaces including Stony Island Arts Bank and Kenwood Gardens. In 2011, Gates helped launch UChicago’s Arts + Public Life initiative; today it manages cultural programming along Garfield Boulevard’s Arts Block.
“Through his practice, he redeems these materials, but he also redeems spaces,” Malloy said. “He takes spaces that are going to get knocked down, that people don't see hope for, and gives them a new chapter—a new purpose.”
Curators say Unto Thee extends beyond museum walls by including tours of nearby Rebuild Foundation sites as part of its programming. “A lot of Theaster’s cultural spaces that he's nurtured over the past two decades are in the South Side of Chicago, within a mile from where we are located,” Mardilovich said.
Theaster Gates: Unto Thee is free and open to all through February 22 at the Smart Museum. Reflecting on his approach to art-making and stewardship at the exhibition’s opening event, Gates remarked: “Art taught me that, in the same way the thing was produced, it could go back into the ground,” adding,“And that in a way, the world is utterly fallible, as are my ideas, as am I.”