Theaster Gates. Concrete slabs from Lorado Taft Midway Studios as installed at Listening House. Photo: Sara Pooley

By ALISON REILLY

Theaster Gates: Unto Thee opens September 23 at the Smart Museum of Art, marking the artist’s first solo exhibition at a museum in Chicago. This overdue presentation of his work will feature installations of materials that Gates acquired through two decades of involvement with the University of Chicago, first as a staff member and then as faculty. The materials include the Department of Art History’s glass lantern slide collection, concrete floors salvaged from the Department of Visual Arts’ Midway Studios, slate from Rockefeller Chapel, and hand-carved wooden pews from Bond Chapel. 

“Unto Thee,” Gates explains, “offers a reckoning with the ways in which true collaboration between the ‘local’ and the ‘institutional’ could result in deep transformation of both. Unto Thee allows me to return every material artifact given to me by the University in a new state of recognition by a larger, cultural context outside of the institution and the city of Chicago, thereby redeeming these discarded materials beyond their state of inheritance.”

A series of public programs, tours, and film screenings at the university and Gates’s cultural centers will accompany the exhibition, including an opening celebration from October 4-5, 2025. Gates will participate in a panel off campus, followed by a performance at Bond Chapel by The Black Monks, Gates’s music project that merges Black musical traditions and Eastern monastic practice. 

Galina Mardilovich, curator at the Smart Museum, said, “The Black Monks are really one facet of Theaster’s practice that we’re so excited to feature. They originally formed as a response to an invitation by Charles Esche to respond to the Smart’s exhibition, Heartland, which connected Chicago-based- musicians with musicians in the Netherlands around the topic “music of the Mississippi.” It’ll be interesting to bring them back here, bring them back home, so to speak.” 

Glass lantern slides from the University of Chicago’s Department of Art History, now in the care of Theaster Gates. Courtesy of the Rebuild Foundation.

For Gates, collecting these pieces of the university’s history is not transactional. He said, “My access to the glass lantern slides depended completely upon my relationship with the facilities team at the University of Chicago. The vitrines from the Oriental Institute arrived at my step, because people were willing to build a bridge from their institution to an art studio. These objects represent stories, relationships, trust, and goodwill.”

The concrete floors from Midway Studios, which are covered in layers of paint, showcase over a hundred years of artistic history. They tell the story of the early twentieth-century sculptor Loredo Taft, who moved his studio from downtown Chicago to the Midway Plaisance. Eventually, as Mardilovich explained, “It became a de facto art space, a studio space for faculty at the University of Chicago before there was an official space for them. Taft created this really interesting community of artists and is credited for supporting women sculptors. He was elevating unconventional and untraditional art makers at the time and supporting them as well as giving them space to create.”

In the early 2010s, when the Logan Center for the Arts was being built, there was demand at the university to renovate Midway Studios. Gates, who was instrumental in the creation of the center, received parts of the studios’ concrete floors that were given away. At some point, he also collected surplus granite from the Logan Center construction site. Vanja Malloy, Dana Feitler Director of the Smart Museum and co-curator of the exhibition, said, “I think that it’s beautiful–the juxtaposition of the granite for a new chapter of the arts at the university that Theaster helped found, with the concrete, the foundational beginnings.”

Gates’s art practice focuses on recontextualizing these architectural elements as sculptures and deriving meaning from the new relationships they create. “These objects are redeemed, and their redemption value is a demonstration of the work that I was invested in outside of the University,” Gates said. “I was trying to amplify the materials that sat in front of me. The amplification was not for my glory; it was simply to demonstrate that everyday things, even when unruly, excessive, inconvenient and without practical use, can be reimagined as intelligible, substantial, and absolutely necessary.”

Theaster Gates. Granite from the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts as installed at Listening House. Photo: Sara Pooley

Along with the exhibition, Gates will be teaching a class called Unto Thee, giving students an opportunity to learn more about the material history of the university and its broader context on the South Side. “From what I’ve observed, Theaster is a beloved colleague to many but also a really inspirational professor,” Malloy said. “He’s really excited about sharing his knowledge and fostering the next generation.”

The Smart Museum also commissioned Gates to create a new work, which will be on display in the museum’s lobby as part of their Threshold series until July 2026. The installation will feature an expansive shelving system showcasing a collection of African masks that Gates recently acquired and conserved, along with his personal record collection. Music will be playing in the lobby, and the museum will invite DJs to activate the space. While plans have not been confirmed, Malloy and Mardilovich are discussing community workshops focused on archiving and collection practices. 

Glass lantern slide from the University of Chicago’s Department of Art History, now in the care of Theaster Gates. Courtesy of the Rebuild Foundation.

Unto Thee provides an opportunity to celebrate the richness of Gates’s generative art practice over the past 20 years and the connections that he has cultivated along the way. “The exhibition demonstrates something evident in the first book of the New Testament, Matthew 25:14-30, the Parable of Talents,” Gates explained. “The ambition that I had at the University of Chicago was to find ways to use its resources and multiply those resources for the impact of the community that I lived in. In addition, I use these materials, transfiguring them from waste products to culturally productive works of art, with the intention of amplifying the University’s deep belief in the arts. In a moment when that belief seems in peril, this exhibition seems even more timely. It is a reminder that art is not a waste, and great art requires great administration, aesthetic execution, and an unwavering belief in artists.”

Theaster Gates: Unto Thee is on view at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago 

September 23, 2025–February 22, 2026

smartmuseum.uchicago.edu

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