Theaster Gates
Sara Pooley/courtesy New Museum Theaster Gates

The door of the freight elevator opened and there they were, in full swing: the Black Monks. Black and dressed in black, they were riffing through a succession of gospel hymns, fragments of blues, and Buddhist chants under the direction of the artist who had assembled them, Chicago-based Theaster Gates. As I joined the crowd sitting and standing in a half circle facing the group, the sole woman among them was holding forth, filling the white-walled galleries with her voice. Soon her melody died down, giving way to the repeated phrases that ranged from the gnomic (“there is a leak, there is a leak…”) to the well-known (“there is a house…,” the melody so familiar that the fact that the house is in New Orleans and called the Rising Sun was not necessary) to chanted syllables. An organ dipped in and out of the tunes, percussion instruments chimed in, and, as the performance climaxed, a church bell, hidden from the audience in a wooden structure, tolled in a manner that brought the fact that we were in a mixture of a church, a Zen monastery, and a New York gallery into sonorous clarity.

We were, in fact, only in an art space. The New Museum, to be exact, where Gates and his Monks marked the closing day of his solo exhibition, Young Lords and Their Traces, appropriately enough a Sunday, with this concert. I had seen the Monks twice before: once in a house in Germany Gates had stripped down and transformed into installation art, and once at the home of art collectors in Napa Valley who had collected his work. Here, the performance summed up and celebrated an exhibition that was as much a ritual and a physical form of incantation as it was a curated assembly of art pieces.

“Theaster Gates: Young Lords and Their Traces,” 2022. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York.
Dario Lasagni/courtesy New Museum “Theaster Gates: Young Lords and Their Traces,” 2022. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York.

Gates, whose father was a roofer (the family tank for melting tar was one of the items on display), obtained degrees in urban design and theology before apprenticing himself to a master ceramicist and then becoming a neighborhood activist in Chicago’s South Side. All of this background has melded and braided throughout Gates’s art, which focused, at least in the first decade that brought him worldwide fame and recognition, on collection fragments of building, castoff pieces of furniture or construction elements, and whole archives of records or books to create inhabitable (if often only for a short time) assemblages. These structures, ranging from the more permanent Dorchester Street Houses in Chicago to the temporary Huguenot House in Kassel, Germany, evoked the many lives that had been led with the buildings or with the various pieces, and invented or imagined others. Gates established himself as an architect of memory whose work became anchors for community building, a focus that he has now headquartered in a renovated bank building around the corner from Dorchester Street.

To support these activities, Gates sold off fragments of these installations or riffs on his method of assemblies for huge prices. He also made artwork in other media, most notably ceramics. In recent years, he has produced a series of monumental vessels and totems based on African sculpture and elements he has either found or copied, and it was this work that gave the New Museum exhibition its title. I found these pieces, arranged in a loose grid on the museum’s polished concrete floor, to be the most compelling of the displays in the way they took Gates’s habit of collecting, reusing, and assembling to a level of abstraction and studied craft. The array’s centerpiece also tied it to the religious or spiritual theme that unified the disparate pieces on the three floors of the exhibition: When you entered the space, you saw what appeared to be a cross made out of slapped-together pieces of wood encrusted with plaster; when you went around to the far wall against which the sculpture stood, you realized the structure was the back support for a fragment of a terra cotta frieze designed by Louis Sullivan.

“Theaster Gates: Young Lords and Their Traces,” 2022. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York.
Dario Lasagni/courtesy New Museum “Theaster Gates: Young Lords and Their Traces,” 2022. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York.

That combination of reliquary, borrowed fragment, and reinterpretation dominated a room with red velvet walls and wood and glass display cases Gates rescued from the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. They were filled with tributes to both a distant (in time and place) culture—a Bamana power figure swaddled in protective cloth that also obscured its form—and to close friends such as the curator Okwui Enwezor, the writer bell hooks, and the designer Virgil Abloh (all recently deceased). The latter was represented by enshrined and embellished chains and shoes he had created.

The complete library of the film critic Robert Bird filled another gallery, joined there by pieces of roofing material Gates had stripped and framed so that they formed a series of six monumental and abstract wall pieces. Previously shown at the Serpentine Gallery in London, these repetitive squares invited perusal and enjoyment of their every accidental rivet, crease, and stain.

The Black Monks performing at the New Museum.
Aaron Betsky The Black Monks performing at the New Museum.

On the fourth floor, where the performance took place, the bell turned out to be another Gates rescue, from St. Laurence Church in Chicago, while the organ was a Hammond B3 (common in Black churches). It was accompanied by old speakers, which, as one critic pointed out, recalled the wall-mounted boxes for which Donald Judd became famous. Gates reinforced this sense of artistic borrowing and homage by turning boards he had salvaged from the New York Armory (now an arts performance and installation venue) into abstract pieces that both directly cited the work of painter Frank Stella and, in some cases, were crosses.

In Young Lords and Their Traces, Gates intersected the spiritual and the material in the recycled fragments and images of Black churches. Through these abstractions and enigmatic forms—which were yet so familiar because of their source material in actual churches or sculptures—the timeless and placeless appeal to the ways in which art stands between the infinite or imageless and the mundane or real become rooted in a particular site: South Side Chicago and a community organized around its churches, as well as West Africa. That this world now appeared in a white-walled museum in New York only reinforced the fact that Gates was not portraying, commenting on, or even expressing that culture, but was rebuilding it as a memorial to be inhabited and learned from—which is how a museum functions. That he sang that memory alive with his Black Monks made the experience of living for a few hours in that museum in a museum all the more powerful.

If you see that Gates’s work is on display anywhere near you, but especially if you find out that the Black Monks are in the exhibition, run, don’t walk. You are about to be plunged into the essence of art, architecture, urban activism, music, and spirit in a manner that can only make you proclaim a breathless amen.

“Theaster Gates: Young Lords and Their Traces,” 2022. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York.
Dario Lasagni/courtesy New Museum “Theaster Gates: Young Lords and Their Traces,” 2022. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York.

The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine or of The American Institute of Architects.

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