Where It All Began

With the opening of a career-spanning exhibition in his hometown, Theaster Gates looks back.

- Elizabeth Cantrell

BEFORE HE WAS an internationally acclaimed artist, Theaster Gates was known to the people in his life as a keeper of old and discarded things. In the mid 2000s, Gates was working as an arts administrator at the University of Chicago, while also buying derelict buildings on the city's South Side and turning them into artists' studios or repositories for his collections of books, records, and photographic slides. When someone at the university had something to get rid of, he'd get a call. "I was not anticipating that it would be a big part of my art practice," he recalls. "I was just a young kid." Twenty years and many thousands of objects later, Gates is a professor of visual art at the University of Chicago and a Guggenheim Fellow, and has collaborated with Prada. His workwhich often examines Black American culture in the form of mixed-media installations has been shown at the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., London's Serpentine Gallery, and the Palais de Tokyo, in Paris.