Theaster Gates is finally bringing a solo exhibition home.
On September 23, Gates will open “Theaster Gates: Unto Thee” at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art. With paintings, ceramics, installations, film and repurposed campus materials, Gates described the show as “symbolic” and “loaded,” the closing of one chapter and the opening of another.
At the same time, just a few miles away in Grand Crossing, he is opening the Land School, a new project of his Rebuild Foundation. Designed to teach and provide resources for artists, the school aims to demystify the mechanics of redevelopment — from policy to contractors to city approvals — and hand tools to the next generation.
Together, the exhibition and the school mark a turning point in Gates’ career. After two decades of turning vacant buildings into libraries, housing and cultural spaces, he said he’s shifting from building institutions to preparing others to carry that work forward.
“Unto Thee” draws from Gates’ history at the U. of C., where he has worked for 20 years and is now a professor of visual arts.
“All of my contemporary art life, a lot of it was informed by classes that I was taking, that I was auditing when I was an administrator at the university, or conversations that grew as a result of me having friendships on the South Side,” he said.
The exhibition features pews from Bond Chapel, glass lantern slides and vitrines from the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures and concrete from Midway Studios. A work he’s eager to showcase is a triptych of tar paintings using roofing techniques and materials such as enamel, bitumen, rubber and copper. One such painting is titled after the Black Panther Party slogan, “Defend the Black race.” Another is for his father, who worked as a roofer.
“They’re paintings that I made that were personal, and I’ve rarely shown those in Chicago,” Gates said. “It’s really nice to honor my dad’s history of labor.”
Repurposed concrete slabs from Lorado Taft’s Midway Studios advertise “Theaster Gates: Unto Thee,” a solo show opening at the Smart Museum of Art on September 23, 2025.
Gates grew up on the West Side and studied ceramics and urban planning at Iowa State before moving to Japan to study pottery. He went on to get a master’s in fine arts and religious studies at the University of Cape Town and a multidisciplinary master’s degree in urban planning, ceramics and religious studies from Iowa State. He returned to Chicago in 1999.
It was here where he began to blur the lines between studio practice and city-making. His development projects got started in Grand Crossing, where he lived. In 2009, he turned a vacant building on the 6900 block of South Dorchester Avenue into a library. He then redeveloped the former Dante Harper Housing Project into the Dorchester Art and Housing Collaborative, with 32 units for artists and low-income residents.
“Initially, it felt very intuitive and impulsive, like I should try to do something that helps my block,” he said. “It was a very nascent idea, it wasn’t a project yet. And then it grew into a project … then it grew into an institution … then it turned into a contested and beloved idea, where we started thinking about principles of ethical redevelopment, and we were using all these words.”
“And then we found ourselves owning buildings, but the buildings were just kind of a means to an end of having platforms where culture could live,” he continued.
From this process came the Stony Island Arts Bank, Kenwood Gardens and the Currency Exchange Cafe. But Gates said the evolution brought a tension: Gates the artist versus Gates the developer, questions of culture and capitalism.
“I would understand that if our neighborhoods are going to thrive, they needed capital,” he said. “But my goal was not extraction, exploitation or some kind of targeted taking. My goal was replenishing, restoration, regeneration — even if that meant it was with my own resources most of the time.”
A lesson he learned in doing this, he said, was to embrace both sides of the work: “Every time we were up against a hurdle, we tried to solve it, not by running away, but just reinventing ourselves.”
Now, Gates said, it’s time to start handing things off to the next generation. Last weekend, he opened the Land School, located at 72nd Street and Dorchester Avenue. Owned by the Rebuild Foundation, his nonprofit, the school will disseminate insights from Gates’ and Rebuild’s work over the years, as well as share resources for navigating land and planning challenges for artists, architects, planners, theorists, scholars and creatives.
“I’m part of a radical tradition of self-empowered people who understood that there was value in trying to create a collective consciousness around land,” Gates said. “If we were all excited about taking all of these buildings that have been forgotten and are no longer accessible, (then) we would be actively in the process of the reclamation of our neighborhoods and our culture.”
The school’s first creative partners in residence are International Anthem, a Chicago-based record label known for free jazz and alternative music, Black chamber music collective D-Composed and DJ Duane Powell. Gates said the Land School will start with hosting performances. He also wants to establish other residencies and opportunities for its archives, previously housed at the Arts Bank, as well as craft-based and process-driven programs.
“Those things will come a little bit after we have full control of our building,” Gates said. “What we’ll be doing at first is just inviting people in to talk with us about ‘how can we model this?’”
For the foreseeable future, Gates wants the Land School to be Rebuild’s primary focus, serving as a central location that unites the work going on in the organization’s other properties.
“Rebuild will still continue to manage, operate, and build partnerships with artists and creative organizations in the other spaces,” a spokesperson for Rebuild said in a statement. Gates himself noted the strength of local institutions like the Blanc Gallery, South Side Community Art Center and DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center.
I think it’s time for me to get out of the way and make space for the next generation of planners, builders, bankers, cultural leaders, neighbors,” he said.
Turning the page also extends to his artistic practice. After years of creating large-scale installations and work for international shows, Gates said he plans to explore a more intimate side of his work.
“I’m becoming more and more interested in the objects for everyday people,” he said. “It may be that the future of my work becomes smaller and quieter and more affordable, and it’s made to be touched and loved by people every day.”
“I felt really fortunate for the last two decades to have an art practice that allowed me to travel the world and to meet lots of interesting people and have museum exhibitions in different places,” Gates said. This, he said, satisfied his soul and ego, and allowed him to check requisite boxes.
Now, he said, “I feel like I have more command that I’ve ever had of my ideas and the things I want to say,” but “I don’t need a museum in order to say them, I’m happy to say them at home.”
“Theaster Gates: Unto Thee” opens at the Smart Museum of Art, 5550 S. Greenwood Ave., on September 23 and runs through February 22.
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