Screening
Theaster Gates Selects
November 16–27, 2022
Metrograph, New York
metrograph.com
Theaster Gates has curated a selection of films under the title The Trace, as part of a series copresented by Gagosian and Metrograph, in the theater and online. The program, organized in conjunction with the exhibition Theaster Gates: Young Lords and Their Traces at the New Museum, New York, will explore filmic relationships across different genres and decades that begin to lay out the origins of Russian engagement with Black American labor movements and analogous cinematic projects.
Gates explains, “Film has long been a medium that has allowed me to understand how the world works. Filmmakers have become allies for our collective imagination and for the expansion of our understanding of visual literacy, political and emotional power, and cinematic possibility. In this sense, the series is a commentary on my exhibition and the history of the Soviet project. Taking a strong cue from Russian and early Black American cinema, the series creates connections between the American Anti-Imperialist League and the Jamaican Red Guards; the all-race conference held in Chicago in 1924 and the American committee for the defense of Puerto Rican political prisoners; the Executive Committee of the Communist International and the Ku Klux Klan; the Confederation of Mexican Workers, antiracist struggles in the British West Indies, labor movements in the Jim Crow South, and the ways in which Black and Russian film cope with, critique, and propagandize political struggle, complexion, white power, and equality throughout the United States.”
Featured films include
Andrei Rublev
Aquarela
Daughters of the Dust
The Defiant Ones
Immortality for All: A Film Trilogy on Russian Cosmism
Killer of Sheep
Show Boat
Zora Neale Hurston Fieldwork Footage
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Still from Daughters of the Dust (1991), directed by Julie Dash
Related News
Art Fair
Frieze Los Angeles 2024
Social Abstraction
March 1–3, 2024, booth D13
Santa Monica Airport, California
frieze.com
Gagosian is pleased to announce its participation in Frieze Los Angeles 2024 with Social Abstraction, a diverse selection of paintings and sculptures rooted in the exploration of historic qualities of abstraction and contemporary social realities. The first in a sequence of three presentations organized by Antwaun Sargent, Social Abstraction at Frieze Los Angeles will be followed by exhibitions in Beverly Hills this summer and in Hong Kong this fall.
The intergenerational group of Black artists in Social Abstraction—Derrick Adams, Theaster Gates, Cy Gavin, Lauren Halsey, and Rick Lowe—operates beyond purely formal concerns to create artworks that move between and beyond figuration and abstraction. They push shape to become landscape, color to reveal people, and texture to map the totality of experience.
Gagosian’s booth at Frieze Los Angeles 2024. Artwork, front to back: © Lauren Halsey, © Cy Gavin, © Theaster Gates. Photo: Ed Mumford
Award
Theaster Gates
Vincent Scully Prize 2023
Theaster Gates has been named the 2023 winner of the National Building Museum’s Vincent Scully Prize. Established in 1999, the award recognizes excellence in practice, scholarship, or criticism in architecture, historic preservation, and urban design. The jury was impressed by Gates’s collecting practice, which in addition to the constellation of Black spaces on Chicago’s South Side that he is actively creating, includes a number of historic record collections, such as those of the godfather of house music, Frankie Knuckles, and the Olympic runner Jesse Owens; over fifteen thousand objects from the legendary Johnson Publishing Company offices; Edward J. Williams and Ana Williams’s collection of approximately four thousand objects of “negrobilia” that make use of stereotypical images of Black people; over sixty thousand glass lantern slides from the University of Chicago; and the fourteen-thousand-volume Prairie Avenue Bookshop Archive.
Theaster Gates at his studio in Chicago, 2020. Photo: Lyndon French
Permanent Installation
Theaster Gates
Altar for the Unbanned
Theaster Gates’s Altar for the Unbanned has been permanently installed at the Harold Washington Library Center branch of the Chicago Public Library (CPL). It features spiral shelves of books that have been banned at different points in American history topped by a rotating neon sign of the word “unbanned.” Actively responding to rising demands for censorship through public organizing, CPL partnered with the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events to commission Gates’s installation. Library officials hope this public artwork will expose citizens to banned titles and encourage them to engage with these books.
Theaster Gates, Altar for the Unbanned, 2023, installation view, Harold Washington Library Center, Chicago Public Library © Theaster Gates
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Essence Harden, curator at Los Angeles’s California African American Museum and cocurator of next year’s Made in LA exhibition at the Hammer Museum, visited Lauren Halsey in her LA studio as the artist prepared for an exhibition in Paris and the premiere of her installation at the 60th Biennale di Venezia this summer.