Theaster Gates’s Dorchester Projects in Chicago

Abstract

In the projects of the artist Theaster Gates, social change and transformation is strongly tied to an actual rebuilding and reactivation of vacant architectures across the South Side of Chicago. Opposed to Richard Florida’s analysis of the artist’s role in the processes of gentrification, in Gates’s model, the artist does not upvalue property in a decaying place only to then become victim to the outcome of this valorization, but the artist is a conscious and acting part in the very process himself with a designated long-term goal. Gates started acquiring abandoned houses at South Dorchester Avenue in Chicago’s Grand Crossing area in 2006, and since then included them into an artist-activated ecology. He inserts architectural remainders into works of art that travel around the world, and when sold to collectors, he reinvests the profits into the reconstruction of the buildings and acquisition of further ones. Especially through an involvement and practical reworking and repurposing of architectural structures, Gates is performing a break from a passive emotional attachment to a nostalgic image of the spaces of non-lived memory that is a prevailing trend in photography at the moment as in the works of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre for example. Gates’s active placemaking includes the investment into the materiality and poetics of space, communal dinners, performances, film screenings and an artist residency program with a focus on sustainable site-specific projects. In Dorchester Projects, Gates’s interests in a history of making, as well as the history of the city cumulate, but despite historical preferentiality, the places have a distinct atmosphere of nowness. He links his artistic practice and social agendas with architectural and aesthetic issues. Gates’s recycling, or also upcycling, an “investment into the care of things” and the permanence of built places is testifying to his interest “to move back and forth between the real, the gestural, and the economic,” all contributing to his “art of staying.”