November 10, 2022 – February 5, 2023
Theaster Gates’ first comprehensive museum display is called “Young Lords and Their Traces.”
Theaster Gates is one of the most fascinating artists working today thanks to his work in the fields of sculpture, social practice, group performance, and archiving. In the early 2000s, Gates came into prominence with a sculpture work distinguished by the use of reclaimed materials and in-depth multidisciplinary histories. Large-scale tar paintings, experimental clay objects, and immersive architectural pieces by Gates all have an elegiac formalism that is connected to both individual and shared labor and spirituality tales. Gates has recently created architectural spaces and sculptural structures for the preservation and sharing of numerous historical collections of pictures and objects in Chicago. According to Gates, social ties as well as physical objects, sounds, sights, and motions all contribute to communal forms of knowledge.
Gates pays tribute to the radical ideas who helped to define his city and the country as a whole in “Young Lords and Their Traces.” This exhibition will feature a number of pieces that collectively honor both heroic personalities and more commonplace, daily icons. These pieces will include paintings, sculptures, videos, performances, and archive collections. Gates’s work has received attention both locally and internationally as a result of his elevation of these more obscure sources of knowledge and his claim that collecting is a type of devotion and recollection. The emotional and intellectual breadth of Gates’ continuously astonishing painting is revealed in “Young Lords and Their Traces.”
“Theaster Gates: Young Lords and Their Traces” is curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director, and Gary Carrion-Murayari, Kraus Family Senior Curator, with Madeline Weisburg, Curatorial Assistant.
New Museum
235 Bowery
New York, NY 10002
USA
