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Art Art & Books

Theaster Gates meditates on Black history at the AGO

THEASTER GATES at the Art Gallery of Ontario (317 Dundas West), to October 30. $19.50, srs $16, stu $11, free Wednesday 6-9 pm. 416-979-6648. See listing.


When he’s not busy turning disused buildings on Chicago’s South Side into cultural assets, Theaster Gates is a potter, painter, professor, interventionist, performance/installation artist, archivist and one of the art world’s most compelling speakers. Many of these interests inform How To Build A House Museum, a deep meditation on Black history that takes over the AGO’s fifth floor.

“House” doesn’t just refer to places like Mackenzie House, museums in homes of historical figures. Gates is the custodian of the archives of the late DJ Frankie Knuckles, the Godfather of House, and plans to incorporate the Knuckles shrine and artifacts here into a house music centre in a renovated Chicago power station. 

Theaster install1294.jpg

Courtesy of the AGO


Rooms focused on Muddy Waters and George Black, a North Carolina brick maker, question who gets memorialized. Paintings and sculpture draw on graphs W.E.B. Du Bois made for the 1900 Paris Exposition charting “Negro Progress” since emancipation. A book compiles responses to Gates’s call to Black artists to describe their own “Negro Progress.”

“My choice to use the word ‘Negro’ was to try to honour that moment Du Bois was participating in, and also to create an anachronism in the show, to bring us back to 1900, [when] the question of Black or Negro progress was something that the whole world was curious about,” says Gates in an interview.

“Part of the reason we made these books was to demonstrate that in some ways some things have progressed in others, in terms of values, they haven’t come all that far. Progress isn’t a given it’s something we all have to continue to work for.”

Theaster install1351.1.jpg

Courtesy of the AGO


The exhibit reaches an ecstatic, Dionysian climax in a dark, club-like room dubbed Progress Palace, where a DJ booth pounds a house track called Free Man, a mirrored sculpture rotates and people in a video jack to the music. 

“I love the idea that house music, for people who abandoned other forms of spirituality, became a secular sacred experience. They could go to the club and get that sense that all of the problems of their day were being washed away by the music, that any bad thing that had happened to them was being redeemed, that there was a community of people that could encourage them – that the club was the church.”

Theaster install1435.jpg

Courtesy of the AGO


An oblong slate slab labelled “House Nation” lies on its side outside the club. Gates, who’s in his early 40s, explains: “Many of the men and women I knew who clubbed when I was 13 or 14, they were already 25 or 26, so they’re now in their 60s and don’t club any more. That cohort of nation builders, whether it’s from the Black Panther movement or the 60s Vietnam anti-war effort – in a way those nations are passing. And that piece is on its side to ask who’s gonna take it over and put it back on the wall. You know, add more people to the nation.”

Theaster install1315.jpg

Courtesy of the AGO


I ask how it’s going with his other  Chicago projects. Is gentrification a problem?

“Artists are not the reason neighbourhoods gentrify,” he replies. “Neighbourhoods that gentrify are on their way toward changing anyway, and sometimes artists have the ability to see value where other people don’t. Out of the urgency to make, they’re willing to live wherever they need to.

“New resources coming to a place is a good thing. But often people who’ve been in the place for 20 years don’t benefit. That’s the part we have to make more equitable. But I feel really good about how art becomes a way to talk about some of these complex ideas, that gets people thinking about their own neighbourhood, their own possibilities, their own legacies.” 

art@nowtoronto.com | @franschechter

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