Taking place across three floors of the museum, this exhibition encapsulates the full range of Theaster Gates’s artistic activities, featuring artworks produced over the past twenty years and site-specific environments created especially for this presentation. Gates has titled the exhibition “Young Lords and Their Traces” in honor of the radical thinkers who have shaped his home city of Chicago and America as a whole. For Gates, collective forms of knowledge are built across objects, images, sounds, movements, and most importantly, through the relationships between people. This survey exhibition will comprise a choreography of works including paintings, sculptures, videos, performances, and archival collections that work together to memorialize both heroic figures and more humble, everyday icons. Gates’s elevation of these quieter sources of knowledge, and his assertion that collecting and archiving are forms not only of preservation but also of devotion and remembrance, have made his work reverberate both locally and internationally.

Gates emerged in the early 2000s with a sculptural practice characterized by its use of salvaged materials and deeply researched interdisciplinary histories—a mode of working that he maintains today. The elegiac formalism of Gates’s large-scale tar paintings, experimental clay vessels, and immersive architectural installations can be linked to both personal and collective narratives of labor and spirituality. Alongside his early sculptural production, Gates has undertaken an ambitious project to revitalize his neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago by transforming unused buildings into experimental spaces for the exploration of Black culture. In recent years, Gates has linked these activities by rescuing a variety of historical collections of images and objects in Chicago and creating architectural spaces and sculptural structures for their preservation and dissemination to wider audiences.

In the New York Times, Aruna D’Souza writes, At the heart of Theaster Gates’s survey at the New Museum, “Young Lords and Their Traces,” sits a curious, mummy-like object in a vitrine: a boli sculpture — a power figure created by Bamana artists in Mali to harness spiritual energy. It was crumbling when the artist acquired it, so he wrapped it in strips of white cloth. This wasn’t simply an act of conservation — it is linked to how the figure was made by those Bamana artists, who swathed wood in fabric before covering it in clay and other sacrificial materials. The move exemplifies what Gates calls “generative care”— tending to the past by carrying its lessons into the future. Read the feature here

Throughout the exhibition, Gates reimagines the function of a museum as a space for personal histories and spiritual convocations. One entire floor has been transformed into a kind of personal museum, gathering artworks, artifacts, and mementos connected to influential figures in Gates’s life and career who have passed away in recent years: curator Okwui Enwezor, writer bell hooks, and Gates’s own father, among others. While tinged with a sense of loss, Gates’s recent work creates a network of intellectual and aesthetic affinities across generations. The result is less a map of personal obsessions than an assembly of voices in which the viewer is invited to participate. Combining an intimate, poetic sensibility and a sense of civic commitment, Gates’s work reimagines art as a form of social sculpture that can open up new modes of collectivity and knowledge production even in the most surprising contemporary settings. Above: Shedrick Mitchell , Heavenly Chord performance

Public events continue:

Thursday, January 19, 6:30 pm: Resurrections. This conversation will explore Gates’s interdisciplinary engagements within his community. Join curators and scholars for a panel discussion moderated by exhibition co-curator Gary Carrion-Muraya. Tickets

Saturday, January 21, noon: Gallery Talk

Independent archivist Zakiya Collier will facilitate a dialogue about community memory and archiving practices. Participants will have an opportunity to share stories about their own collections and create strategies for object care. Register

Thursday, January 26, 6:60pm: Body as Vessel

Exhibition artists Vivian Caccuri and Miles Greenberg will discuss their individual practices and collaborative work on “The Shadow of Spring,” followed by a brief Q+A. Tickets

Selected Saturdays and Sundays, through February 4, musician Shedrick Mitchell will activate the organ featured in A Heavenly Chord (2022). Performances will take place on the Fourth Floor, 1–4 p.m. and are free with Museum admission. Info

Theaster Gates: Young Lords and Their Traces

Through Feb. 5 at the New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York, NY Info