Cosmology of Yard, Whitney Biennial
Cosmology of Yard
2010 WHITNEY BIENNIAL
FEBRUARY 25MAY 30, 2010
Performances By Black Monks of Mississippi
Friday, march 12
Friday, april 23
7:30 pm
Lower Gallery
The Black Monks of Mississippi will temporarily submit themselves to ideals of musical restraint and semi-strict adherence to the blues form, which Theaster Gates believes
to be the most important root in the American musical tradition. The Black Monks strive to be holy, restrained, orderly, and disciplined, but they fall short. What they achieve instead is a very human response to displaced spiritual ecstasy, particularly in the flavor of the Black Church. The Black Monks of Mississippi
http://www.whitney.org/Exhibitions/2010Biennial/TheasterGates
http://www.whitney.org/Exhibitions/2010Biennial/Introduction
To Speculate Darkly, Milwaukee Art Museum
Theaster Gates Artist Installation To Speculate Darkly Reinterprets Craft and Fosters Community
http://www.mam.org/info/pressroom/2010/02/theaster-gates-artist-installation-to-speculate-darkly-reinterprets-craft-and-fosters-community/
Theaster Gates Artist Installation To Speculate Darkly Reinterprets Craft and Fosters Community
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Claudia Arzeno
Tel. (414) 220-4321
Cel. (773) 629-2853
Email: Claudia@chipstone.org
Theaster Gates
Artist Installation To Speculate Darkly Reinterprets Craft and Fosters Community
Milwaukee, WI February 08, 2010 Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates, Jr. has reached out to area craftspeople and the African-American community to reinterpret for the present day the legacy of Dave Drake, a slave in antebellum South Carolina who famously adorned his pots with poetic couplets. The installation, titled To Speculate Darkly, will transform the Milwaukee Art Museums Decorative Arts Gallery from April 16 through August 1, 2010, into an engaging exploration into the significance of craft labor and race in America.
To Speculate Darkly juxtaposes the uniquely spectacular pots of Dave Drake, known as Dave the Potter, with a built environment comprised of a glass lantern slide tunnel, ceramic speakers, and vessels created by Theaster Gates Jr. Race, craft, and labor are at the center of my work on Dave the Potter, says the artist. Recently selected to participate in the 2010 Whitney Biennial, Gates is a potter, musician, and performance artist who has earned national acclaim for his intelligent commentaries on race, the city, and the museum. As the show was starting in Wisconsin, I wanted Daves story to engage both craftsmen and the African-American community of Milwaukee. To do this, I worked closely with the Kohler Manufacturing Company and several African-American churcheswith Greater New Birth Church being our most amazing collaborator. The ambition of To Speculate Darkly is twofold: to amplify the life and work of Dave the Potter and to ask new questions about the function of craft objects in contemporary art practice.
The installation will feature a music component as well, giving a resounding voice to Dave the Potter and, by extension, craftspeople working today. Drawing on the relationship Gates has created with Daves persona, the artist arranged Daves poems to music and engaged a local, two-hundred-person Milwaukee church choir to perform a captivating sound piece. The choir will perform live during the MAM After Dark event that shares the exhibitions opening on Friday, April 16.
To Speculate Darkly reinterprets a section of art history that is often ignored. Through this work, Theaster Gates, Jr. reaches out to a wide and diverse audience by making the artwork contemporary and accessible, as well as creating a space where conversations can take place.
Friday, April 16, 2010, 5 p.m.midnight
Theaster Gates opening and MAM After Dark
Sunday, May 16, 2010, 10 a.m.4 p.m.
Target Family Sundays: Making Pots Sing
To Speculate Darkly is supported by a generous grant from the Joyce Foundation, which fosters the development of new works in dance, music, theater, and visual arts by artists of color. Additional support provided by the African American Art Alliance. The exhibition is curated by Ethan Lasser, curator at the Chipstone Foundation.
Gestures of Resistance
GESTURES OF RESISTANCE
JANUARY 26, 2010 - JUNE 26, 2010
MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY CRAFT
724 Northwest Davis Street, Portland, Oregon 97209
SARA BLACK AND JOHN PREUS, ANTHEA BLACK, CAROLE LUNG, CAT MAZZA, MUNG LAR LAM, EHREN TOOL, AND THEASTER GATES
CO-CURATED BY SHANNON STRATTON AND JUDITH LEEMANN
EXHIBITION OVERVIEW
The exhibition Gestures of Resistance brings to Portlands Museum of Contemporary Craft a focus on contemporary craft actions: work that deploys craft to agitate for change through direct political statements, public interventions, or dialogical, community-specific projects. The curators, artists and museum delineate and invite engagement with a new arena of action in which context-savvy crafting, hierarchical mischief-making, and cultural re-scripting play themselves out.
Designed to unfold over its tenure at the museum, with 8 artists slated to take up residency in the galleries and in the city, Gestures of Resistance posits craft as methodology, extending its province to a range of performances that embody care through deliberate movements and canny gesture. Planned as a dynamic, collective studio, with each artist remaking the space to suit their own purposes, the museum will be work space, performance venue and town square. The 'work' in the museum is both the doing of art work: the process and practice of studio, and the evidence of that doing: the materials, detritus, and resulting objects. The exhibition takes the approach that to understand performative craft requires a relational lens that sees objects and gestures as deriving meaning largely from how and where they are deployed, and that sees action as situated within social and political particulars. Layered on this is the framing of the exhibition itself as a performance in which each artist manipulates the exhibition as they take up residence, usurping the curator's position as narrator of objects by choosing with what and how they chose to mark their intentions.
Holiness In 3 Parts: An Exhibition at Boots Contemporary Art Space
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nL_jLID7kgw
Performances by poet, Orron Kenyatta, The Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church and The Black Monks of Mississippi, Leroy Bach, Cuz, Yaw, Avery R. Young, Tina Howell, Matthew Lux and Theaster Gates.
Black Monks of Mississippi at the South Side Community Art Center
South Side Community Art Center
Friday, October 16, 2009
6:30 PM Ono
7:30 PM Black Monks of Mississippi
I am looking forward to performing with Cuz on drums, Leroy Bach on keys and Matt Lux on bass. Its been a while since I've gone for it, so I am very excited.
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Salvage One Performance
Of This Land - The Artist's Touch
Friday, May 1, 9-10pm
Salvage One
I840 W. Hubbard Avenue
Chicago, IL 60622
Join me and Baby Alright for what promises to be a great and weird evening of music with some reflection on the passing value of things.
Our Literal Speed Talk
Saturday, 2 May, 7pm 9pm
Closing, featuring the South Shore Drill Team, Theaster Gates, Hal Foster, and Anne M. Wagner, 107 Kent Hall, University of Chicago
OUR LITERAL SPEED manifests the imperatives that materialize the theoretical and the pedagogical. No longer can we interpret forms of academic and artistic professionalism as neutral, abstract backgrounds to the aesthetic and performative. These activities have produced their own distinctive surfaces and procedures: the "aesthetic" has become discursive and "discourse" has become aesthetic.
Blue Sky Black Monk
Blue Sky Black Monk
Japan's Sennichimae Blue Sky Dance Club
Meets Chicago's Black Monks of Mississippi
Tuesday, February 3, 6:30pm, Free
Experimental Station
6100 S. Blackstone, Chicago IL 60637
During the last three months, Sennichimae and the Black Monks have used the Internet as a means of exchanging musical and body movements inspired by their cultural and artistic roots. The Sennichimae Blue Sky Dance Club, an all-female butoh-influenced Japanese company, is devoted to uncovering original physical expression with a pop sensibility. The Black Monks of Mississippi is a music and performance ensemble interested in the relationship between black music, eastern philosophy and ritual aesthetics. In Chicago, the two will meet for the first time for Blue Sky Black Monk, a raw and extraordinary multicultural collaboration of body and sound.
Shout at Sonotheque
Monday, January 26
8pm-2am
Chicago's DJ Madrid, Eric Williams, Sadie Woods, and Sean Alvarez fuse global sounds with music inspired by the black church.
$5 Cover
1444 West Chicago Avenue
theaster.gates@gmail.com
Artist Talk and Performance at Little Black Pearl
Temple Exercises at Little Black Pearl
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Little Black Pearl
1060 E. 47th Street
3:306 pm This communal happening includes an artist talk, performance, and reception with Theaster Gates Jr., the Black Monks of Mississippi, and Little Black Pearls Temple Exercises fabrication team.
RSVP required by Friday, January 2.
Call 312.397.4032 or e-mail
mca-event@mcachicago.org
Admission is free, but space is limited.
The Museum of Contemporary Arts new exhibition, Temple Exercises, features the work of Chicago artist
and urban planner Theaster Gates Jr. and is on view January 6 through February 1, 2009. Gates creates
sculptures, performs musically with the Black Monks
of Mississippi, and develops events and spaces that
bring together members of disparate communities.
*Exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art- January 2009*
Temple Exercises is an extended work by Gates which invites audiences to move across the city and engage in secular urban rituals that, for him, reflect the experience of the black church and its aesthetics. At the MCA, Gates will transform the McCormick Tribune Gallery into a temple-like environment, a contemplative space within the museum. Gates envisions the space as a place to reflect and participate in three phenomena that he sees within Chicagos cultural landscapeshout, soul, and shineand that encompass principles of spiritual expression, sustenance, and service. Each of these three elements will be manifested within the space through sculptural forms and through performances, or exercises, on most Tuesdays in January. These will at times involve shoe shining, music, and other communal rituals.
Extending the project beyond the MCAs exhibition, Gates invites viewers to join him on a journey to other cultural spaces: Little Black Pearl (1060 East 47th Street), where Gates has involved a workforce development team in fabricating Temple Exercises and where another Temple structure will be on view; Shine King (336 N. Central), where Gates regularly takes part in the ritual of getting his shoes shined; and Sonotheque (1444 West Chicago), a music club.
http://www.mcachicago.org/exhibitions/exh_detail.php?id=211
Fluidity: 7 Hats In 48 Minutes
Artists at Work Forums
Fluidity: 7 Hats in 48 Minutes
Chicago Cultural Center
November 20, 2008
6:00-7:30pm
Join Theaster Gates and friends, including musicians Jayve Montgomery and Leroy Bach for a performance and Q and Aabout the excitement and complexity of weaving creative andprofessional passions together into a singular art (or professional)practice. Drawing on aspects of various parts of his creative andprofessional world, Theaster will unveil his day and make room forworship, wine and in-fighting. Theaster's collaborators includehistorian and photographer Lee Bey; artist Maria Gaspar; architect Charlie Vinz; administrator Robert Rosenberg; monk and musician Jayve Montgomery; nephew Jamaal Banks; artist Marvin Tate; and musician Leroy Bach.
The Black Monks at the Hyde Park Art Center- September 28, 2-5pm
The Blacks Monks will be performing at the Hyde Park Art Center to kick off this year's Chicago Artist Month celebration. The event is the perfect send off for the Monks, who will be traveling to the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Netherlands to be a part of an exhibition co-curated with the Smart Museum called "The Heartland." The Black Monks are a performance ensemble with many changing members. The current configuration includes Marvin Tate, Theaster Gates and Tiyabe on vocals, Leroy Bach on keys and guitar and Tunji on acoustic guitar. The event promises to be loads of fun.
Sermons from the Tea Shack
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Center for the Proliferation of Afro-Asian Artifacts
2003 South Halsted
6-8pm
Join me and the Black Monks in our final presentation at the Center. I will be taking questions about my most recent body of work, Tea Shacks, Collard Greens and the Preservation of Soul.
Tea and sake will be served.
Hosted by the Chicago Artists Coalition
Re-presenting Jacob Lawrence at the Field Museum
Re-presenting Jacob Lawrence
at The Field Museum
Thursday, April 24, 2008
6:00-8:00PM
East Entrance at the Field Museum
1400 S. Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, IL
This program is being held in conjunction with the current exhibit,
Re-presenting The Migration: Reproductions of Paintings by Jacob Lawrence.
Join us for a lively discussion on Lawrences works, how to present his art, and the representation of African American Art.
Panelists include:
Mara Tapp (Moderator)
Peter Nesbett
Shelly Bancroft
Theaster Gates
Center for the Proliferation of Afro-Asian Artifacts
The Center for the Proliferation of Afro-Asian Artifacts
presents:
~Tea Shack Songs featuring the Black Monks of Mississippi~
Meditation/Performance Times
April 11th - 6:00 -10:00pm
April 25th - 6:00 -10:00pm
May 22nd - 6:00pm-8:00pm
*Discussion and Final Performance by the Black Monks of Mississippi
People of The Mud: A Talk
Saturday, March 8, 2008
Chicago Cultural Center
78 East Washington
Chicago Rooms
People of the Mud 2: Another Look at Chicago Ceramics is on view in the Chicago Cultural Center. The exhibition offers a glimpse at the wide ranging practice of Chicago artists who work in clay. Organized by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and curated by Nathan Mason, Curator of Special Projects for the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, the exhibition is a follow-up to the exhibition that Mason curated for the Department of Cultural Affairs two years ago.
Artists in the exhibition, who started their careers in different parts of the world, have come together to show an overview of the range of ceramics coming out of Chicago. The exhibition includes work by Matthew Groves (sculptures), Dorothy Hughes (wall pieces and serving pieces), Erica Jane Huntzinger (ceramic painting), Jason Messinger (tile murals), Laurie Shaman (vases and vessels), Charles Van Gilder (figures), and The Yamaguchi Institute/Shoji Yamaguchi (installation).
These artists provide a look at the diversity of ceramics in Chicago today, said Nathan Mason. Here we have work ranging from abstract to figurative, sculptural to functional, in porcelain, earthenware, stoneware and more.
Viewing hours for People of the Mud 2: Another Look at Chicago Ceramics at the Chicago Cultural Center are Mondays through Thursdays, 8 am to 7 pm; Fridays, 8 am to 6 pm; Saturdays 9 am to 6 pm and Sundays, 10 am to 6 pm The Chicago Cultural Center is closed on holidays.
DCA Press Release
Leela Ghandi and Josh Abrams in Conversation
Representations: A Series on Culture, Politics and Aesthetics
Invites you to participate in an evening of conversation with
Using the casual salon format as a launching point for cultural convergence, Representations provides common ground for artists, thinkers and cultural-workers to move from the margins of public discourse on creativity, community, politics, and culture to the center. Through these social happenings, we hope to share language, creative interests, forge new relationships, and begin a new creative conversation.
Please join us!
Yamaguchi Institute at the Department of Cultural Affairs
People of the Mud 2: Another look at Chicago Ceramics
January 12 March 9
Opening reception: Friday, January 11, 6 8 PM
Chicago Rooms
Chicago Cultural Center
78 E. Washington