Gates
Mississippi is my Africa
Let’s forget about artists locked away in their studios, and let’s forget about easels, palettes, canvases and the smell of turpentine. Theaster Gates, born in 1973, works in the midst of people, in the streets of Chicago, in uninhabited flats and big abandoned warehouses. Like King Midas, everything he touches becomes precious. He transforms empty buildings into theatres, studios, libraries and restaurants filled with people and artists. With the discarded objects he finds around him, he builds works of art about the old black ghettoes, racial segregation and the struggles that emerge from these. When he sells his work, he spends the money earned back into urban renewal and the regeneration of entire decayed neighbourhoods. He calls it a ‘circular ecological system’, an ingenious way of realising his dream, which is to transform the world through art.
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Mississippi is my Africa
Let’s forget about artists locked away in their studios, and let’s forget about easels, palettes, canvases and the smell of turpentine. Theaster Gates, born in 1973, works in the midst of people, in the streets of Chicago, in uninhabited flats and big abandoned warehouses. Like King Midas, everything he touches becomes precious. He transforms empty buildings into theatres, studios, libraries and restaurants filled with people and artists. With the discarded objects he finds around him, he builds works of art about the old black ghettoes, racial segregation and the struggles that emerge from these. When he sells his work, he spends the money earned back into urban renewal and the regeneration of entire decayed neighbourhoods. He calls it a ‘circular ecological system’, an ingenious way of realising his dream, which is to transform the world through art.
