Theaster Gates‘ work in sculpture, social practice, performance, and archiving has made him one of the most compelling artists of today’s dynamic.
Theaster Gates emerged in the mid-2000s with a sculptural practice characterized by the use of reclaimed materials and deeply documented interdisciplinary chronicles. Through his exhibition “Young Lords and Their Traces” at the New Museum in New York, open through February 05, 2023, the artist questions this elegiac formalism of his enormous scope of artistic creations.
His exploratory mud vessels and living construction installations can be linked to individual and collective narratives of labor and otherness.
Most recently, Theaster Gates has been safeguarding various authentic collections of images and objects in Chicago, creating both spaces and sculptural designs for their preservation and dissemination to larger crowds.
For Theaster Gates, aggregated types of information are worked through objects, images, sounds, developments and connections between individuals.
In the exhibition “Young Lords and Their Traces” Theaster Gates praises the extreme brains that have shaped his city and the United States at large. This exhibition will contain a selection of works including sculptures, paintings, recordings, and a set of chronicles that together commemorate both chivalric figures and more modest, regular symbols.
The rise of these quieter sources of information and Theaster Gates‘ statement that collecting is a form of dedication and recognition have made his work resonate on a global scale as through his exhibition “Young Lords and Their Traces” at the New Museum in New York, he shows the proximity and depth of his amazing work.