Theaster Gates “Young Lords And Their Traces”

The New Museum of Contemporary Art

This event has ended.

Floors 2–4

Theaster Gates’ first American survey exhibition encompasses the full range of his artistic activities, featuring works produced over the past twenty years alongside new site-specific installations. Titled by Gates “Young Lords and Their Traces” in honor of the radical thinkers who shaped his home city of Chicago and America as a whole, Gates intertwines explorations of public histories with personal reflections on important individuals from his own life, including the late curator Okwui Enwezor, writer bell hooks, and his father, Theaster Gates Sr. For Gates, collective forms of knowledge are built across objects, images, sounds, movements, and most importantly, through the relationships between people. This survey will comprise a choreography of works including his celebrated tar paintings and ceramic vessels, recent videos, archival collections, and sound installations that work together to memorialize both heroic figures and local histories.