For the first gallery exhibition of this multi-disciplinary project, Gates set up a factory consists of four Pavilions, occupied by "skilled makers" who worked in Locust Projects’ main gallery. Starting from an empty space, the "skilled makers" produced "things" for the duration of the exhibition.
Concurrently, Soul Manufacturing Corporation will host programs by a yoga instructor, a DJ, and a reader, all there to care for the makers and the audience. Inspiration for this pro-gramming stems from the lectors who presented news, politics, and literature to illiterate workers in the early industrial era. Soul Manufacturing Corporation is in its second year of exploring and creating relationships between aesthetics, labor and race.
Soul Manufacturing Corporation is a multi-city initiative based in Chicago that works in tandem with the Rebuild Foundation, an urban redevelopment organization dedicated to the creative re-use of buildings and design education throughout communities of color.
About Theaster Gates: Theaster Gates was born in 1973. He lives and works in Chicago. When the recession hit a few years ago, this 39-year-old sculptor, performer and urban planner began buying boarded-up houses on the street where he lives in Grand Crossing—a hardscrabble, mostly black neighborhood that sits eight miles south of downtown Chicago. Gates started gutting the forlorn interiors of these spaces and using the domestic detritus to create haunting objects— from throne-like chairs made of clapboard siding to porch swings made from reconfigured door frames.
Then, in a move that left the jaded art world slack-jawed, he began transforming these spaces into cultural anchors—libraries, bookstores, music archives, a pop- up café—using workers he hired from the area, some of whom were previously unemployed.
No one—until Gates—found a way to leverage an artistic practice to make a realtime, bottom-line difference in the lives and spaces next door. Gates says he's trying to invent "the Main Street I want to hang out on" but he is also pushing art beyond the sphere of social commentary into the arena of nitty-gritty do-gooding.
Gates taught ceramics and studied urban planning before launching himself into the city's performance-art scene.
Gates is known for his performances, installations, and urban interventions, which transform spaces, institutions, traditions, and perceptions. His training as an urban planner and sculptor, and subsequent time spent studying clay, has given him keen awareness of the poetics of production and systems of organizing.
When Gates is not making art for museums, he is converting abandoned buildings into cultural spaces that allow not only new cultural moments to happen in unexpected places, but raise the expectations of where “place-making” happens and why.
One of his most esteemed projects is ‘Dorchester Projects’ (2006), which is
ongoing still. For his exhibition "My Labor is My Protest" (2012), Gates honored
his father’s work as a roofer as an alternative form of protest during the
American Civil Rights Era by transforming one gallery into a library of race-
related literature with over 10,000 books, open to the public at White Cube
Gallery in London.
Earlier this year, Gates became the breakout hit of Documenta, a prestigious contemporary-art survey that's held in Kassel, Germany, once every five years. For his project, 12 Ballads for Huguenot House, Gates stripped the innards of an abandoned building on his block and shipped the salvage to Germany, where he and his team—along with some additional German hires—used the materials to renovate an abandoned 1826 house in Kassel.
All summer long, crowds filtered into Huguenot House to find wall-sized videos of the singing Monks projected across its peeling floral-flecked wallpaper. Gates had filmed the singers back in the Chicago house just hours before it was dismantled. (After Documenta ended in September, some of the materials stayed put, but the rest was shipped back to Chicago.)
Gates is also gaining an international reputation for the way his art redefines upcycling, that well-worn idea of turning found materials into something freshly prized—a notion he's started applying to discarded or obsolete bodies of knowledge.
He's been in at least a dozen museum shows over the past four years: Seattle Art Museum (2011), Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (2011), Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago (2011), Milwaukee Art Museum (2010) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2009).
His work has been shown in group exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2010) and the Tokoname Museum of Ceramic History, Japan (2005).
He also featured in “dOCUMENTA 13”, Kassel, Germany (2012), the “Armory Show”, New York (2011) and “Whitney Biennial”, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2010).
This year Theaster Gates was also nominated The Innovator of the Year Awards 2012 as artist from the WSJ. Magazine that every year nominate the Innovator of the Year Award: the winners include designers, architects, artists and tech visionaries, all of whom share a passion for collaboration, and interaction with a broad audience.
ABOUT THE LOCUST PROJECTS: 2013 marks the 15th anniversary of Locust Projects, a not-for-profit exhibition space founded by three Miami artists in order to provide contemporary visual artists the freedom to experiment with new ideas and methods without the limitations of conventional exhibition spaces. Artists are encouraged to create site-specific installations as an extension of their representative work, and Locust Projects offers them a vibrant Miami experience to develop their ideas. Locust Projects is committed to offering an approachable and inviting venue for the Miami and internation-al art community to experience new work and meet the artists.
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