Theaster Gates: Craft of the divine

Theaster Gates is reshaping the relationship between art, community, and the built world. Through sculpture, performance, and architectural intervention, he explores themes relating to race, urban renewal, social justice, and the intersection of culture and place. Drawing from a background in urban planning, Gates uses materials and spaces as tools for social change. His practice challenges dominant narratives and recirculates cultural and economic capital to transform communities marginalized by systems of inequality.

In 2010, he founded the Rebuild Foundation, an ambitious and multi-faceted project aimed at revitalising underserved areas of Chicago’s South Side through cultural and community-led programs. Rebuild projects such as the Stony Island Arts Bank—a former bank repurposed as a cultural centre, archive, and gallery—illustrate how such locations can platform the arts, amplify marginalised voices, and create a shared sense of space. Across all scales, from intimate objects to large-scale interventions, Gates’ work demonstrates how art can catalyse change—transforming spaces and the communities who inhabit them.

Dive into our interview with Theaster Gates on creativity as a spiritual act, rethinking materials, and building communities through art.

hube: Thinkers like Aristotle and Aquinas explored the concept of an “intellectual soul,” believing that it connected human reason to the divine.

Theaster Gates: I wonder if a person that was deeply committed to combining the divine and humanity would ever fully articulate it as such. There was probably a time when the chasm between humanity and divinity was much narrower. I believe people knew and understood the divine because there were fewer distractions, fewer hurdles.

People could recognise their deep dependency upon nature, the land, their communities, and human ability. They recognised that there were things that they didn’t understand, things about their bodies, about the earth, about things beyond the earth that were hard to explain. People had time to reflect, to ponder, to debate, to grow their souls. That growth seemed to have had multiple consequences. It grew our understanding of language and arithmetic, of war, but it also helped us understand the complex colonial program—that one might even trump the divine with human order.

I spend a lot of my time thinking about the relationship between these two things. One’s capacity to imagine the beautiful and conceive of the invisible feels like craft. To give shape to ideas and to give concrete form to the things we think about. These might be ways of aligning our belief in the relationship between the earth and the unseen.

h: Working with archives often involves reflecting on the past to better understand the present. Does your experience with history give you hope for the future?

TG: Working with archives has helped me understand how rich and complex the past is. Let’s take my glass lantern slide collection as an example. That archive is a kind of history of art. It recognises so deeply the ways in which history, and the history of images, painting, sculpture, and architecture, have been shaped by the intelligences and preoc- cupations of humanity. It also demonstrates the ways in which creative leadership creates a genre, a style, even a trend. History is really a series of incidents in which new ideas and new technologies beget new forms, and those forms are imitated until the next form is conceived. In this way, we’re always creating a future. We are always calcifying history. They are the forms that help us survive.

h: Artistic interpretation of crises preserves the emotional memory of society, helping it mature and grow. How do you view the social function of art?

TG: The social is baked into the origin story of art. We wouldn’t have drawing, let’s say, if it wasn’t for humanity’s attempt to understand the body and the anatomical structures and systems that preside in the body. Painting was not born purely for enjoyment or for commerce. We could take early paintings as an opportunity for man to simply articulate what man is, what people are, and what people see—a communication device. Drawings created warnings for others. Drawings celebrated victories. Drawings tried to record the complexities within us and around us on behalf of society. Art has always been social and carried social possibility. It’s a demonstrated attempt at understanding ourselves.

h: Your installations often use materials with sacred or historic significance alongside the mundane, recontextualising their meaning within the context of community and memory. Is it always a matter of interpretation?

TG: I don’t always define the things that I anticipate being sacred versus mundane. It is unreasonable to imagine that plywood is mundane simply because it can be bought at a hardware store in bulk. The conditions that created plywood required innovation in compression, bonding, resistance, and tree salvage. All of these things that create what seems to be a mundane object, like plywood, are in fact, the full expression of humanity’s capacity to solve problems and innovate.

Would I consider plywood sacred? Absolutely not. But could we imagine the conditions that generated the possibility of plywood as important, as important as the sacred? We absolutely could recognise the conditions of innovation as sacred. So, my job is to demonstrate that this object that we imagined to be mundane has its own origin story and the possibility of something great.

h: Modern cities are trying to meet not only the material but also the emotional needs of their inhabitants. What changes to the urban environment have you found most successful?

TG: The question of the city is an interesting one for me. I can remember reading Calvino’s Invisible Cities for the first time. The historic city was trying to offer us something: a relationship between commerce, dwelling, worship, play, education, reflection, and the agora. Those aspects of life are quite connected to each other. The historic city understood the full needs of a person and tried to deliver that. The modern city has other goals, and these are goals that don’t always account for how to be a whole human. I think some of the best modern cities are these historic places.

The time that I’ve spent in Kyoto over the years has made me super appreciative of the streets of small businesses and the relationship between living spaces and workspaces. Dwellings and retail are all in one family’s compound. I think that there are cities like Kyoto that understand the ways in which we need to live, have gamed out strategies to keep family units whole, and helped the individual find ways to live a full life.