Opening Weekend: Theaster Gates in Conversation

Want to be the first to know when RSVPs open to the public for future Theaster Gates programming?

The celebration continues on October 5, 2025 from noon to 2:00 pm, with a conversation between Theaster Gates, Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Hamza Walker. The conversation will be held at The Land School (formerly St. Laurence Elementary School).

RSVP is required. Registered spots will be held until the event's start at noon, when walk-ins will be welcomed on a first-come, first-served basis. Each opening weekend program requires separate registration. Please note that space is limited, and registration in advance does not guarantee admittance once the event begins.

Theaster Portrait by: Lyndon French

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ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Theaster Gates

Theaster Gates is an artist whose practice finds roots in conceptual formalism, sculpture, space theory, land art, and performance. Trained in urban planning and within the tradition of Japanese ceramics, Gates's artistic philosophy is guided by the concepts of Shintoism, Buddhism and Animism - most notably honoring the "spirit within things." Foundational to Gates's practice is his custodianship and critical redeployment of culturally significant Black objects, archives, and spaces. Known for his recirculation of art-world capital, Gates smartly upturns art values, land values, and human values. In all aspects of his work, he contends with the notion of Black space as a formal exercise – one defined by collective desire, artistic agency, and the tactics of a pragmatist. Through the expansiveness of his approach as a thinker, maker, and builder, Gates extends the life of disappearing and bygone histories, places, and cultural traditions.

Gates has exhibited and performed at the Albuquerque Foundation, Sintra, Portugal (2024); The LUMA Foundation, Arles, France (2023, 2024); The New Museum, New York, (2022); The Aichi Triennial, Tokoname (2022); The Serpentine Pavilion, London (2022); The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK (2021); Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2013 and 2021); Tate Liverpool, UK (2020); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2020); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2019); Palais de Tokyo Paris, France (2019); Sprengel Museum Hannover, Germany (2018); Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland (2018); National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (2017); Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada (2016); Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy (2016); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2016); Punta della Dogana, Venice, Italy (2013); and dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany (2012).

Gates is a professor at the University of Chicago in the Department of Visual Arts and the College. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honorary degrees including the Guggenheim Fellowship (2025); Isamu Noguchi Award (2023); National Buildings Museum Vincent Scully Prize (2023); Frederick Kiesler Prize for Architecture and the Arts (2022); an Honorary Fellowship from the Royal Institute of British Architects (2021); the World Economic Forum Crystal Award (2020); J.C. Nichols Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development (2018); Nasher Sculpture Prize (2018); Sprengel Museum Kurt Schwitters Prize (2017); and Artes Mundi 6 Prize.

Denise Ferreira da Silva

The artist and philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva is the Samuel Rudin Professor in the Humanities and Co-Director of the Critical Racial & Anti-Colonial Study Co-Laboratory at New York University and adjunct professor at the Monash University School of Art, Architecture, and Design (Australia). Her work artistic and academic work reflect and speculate on themes and questions crucial to contemporary philosophy, aesthetics, political theory, black thought, feminist thought, and historical materialism.

She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), The Impagavel Divide (Workshop of Political Imagination and Living Commons, 2019), Unpayable Debt (Stenberg / MIT Press, 2022) and co-editor (with Paula Chakravartty) of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013)

Her artwork includes the films Serpent Rain (2016), 4Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), Soot Breath / Corpus Infinitum (2020) and Ancestral Claims/Ancestral Clouds (2023) in collaboration with Arjuna Neuman; and the relational artistic practices Poethical Readings and Sensing Salon, in collaboration with Valentina Desideri. She has performed shows and lectures in important artistic spaces, such as the Pompidou Centre (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London), MASP (São Paulo), Guggenheim (New York) and MoMa (New York). She also wrote and created for publications for major art events (Liverpool Biennale, 2017; São Paulo Biennale, 2016; 2023 Venice Biennale, 2017 and Documenta 14, São Paulo Biennale, 2023) and published in art spaces such as Canadian Art, Texte Zur Kunst and E-Flux.

Hamza Walker

Hamza Walker is the director of The Brick (formerly LAXART) a non-profit alternative art space in Los Angeles. Walker has been chasing the same high for over three decades. Ever since seeing avant-garde concerts and performances in late 80s Chicago, he has felt compelled to share a boundless curiosity about art. In the ensuing years, Walker has curated dozens of exhibitions ranging from solo to thematic exhibitions; from the production of new work to career surveys. Recent exhibitions at The Brick include Elizabeth Paige Smith: Unshade Me Of You and Gregg Bordowitz: This Is Not A Love Song both from 2025.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

The Smart Museum of Art presents Theaster Gates's first solo museum exhibition in his hometown of Chicago.

A self-designated “keeper of objects,” the artist Theaster Gates investigates the value of things and their potential to hold layered meanings. He has been dedicated to investing in the care of these objects as a way to nurture stories and voices – often Black stories and voices – largely overlooked by history or institutional structures.

The exhibition Theaster Gates: Unto Thee is rooted in several core collections of objects that have been part of Gates’s artistic practice which he acquired through the University of Chicago, where he is Professor of Visual Arts. Ranging from the Department of Art History’s glass lantern slides and display vitrines from the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (formerly the Oriental Institute), to paint-stained concrete from the floors of Midway Studios and wooden pews made for Bond Chapel, all objects have been discarded and identified as no longer needed. In creating new works with them over the years – and, as will be done again, in new installations at the Smart – Gates challenges that notion of stasis by instead excavating more histories, more stories. These installations will be accompanied by Gates’s more recent work including paintings, ceramics, film, and pieces incorporating the archive of the Johnson Publishing Company.

Rooted in materials and Gates’s interest in the process of making, Unto Thee embodies the relationships Gates has fostered within the University of Chicago, local communities, the South Side and broader Chicago. It underscores the artist’s unassailable belief in the potential of art to connect with and transform communities.

The exhibition is accompanied by a site-specific installation as part of the Museum’s Threshold Lobby Series, which will be on view through July 2026.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

The Land School, 1353 E. 72nd St., Chicago, United States