The Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates has developed an expanded practice encompassing space development, sculpture, installation and performance. Works such as Sanctum (2015), an installation within the bombed-out remains of Temple Church in Bristol, England, and The Dorchester Project in Chicago, have created multipurpose studio spaces as catalysts for urban regeneration and community building. Through the nonprofit Rebuild Foundation, Gates renovated a cluster of formerly abandoned buildings on Chicago’s South Side, transforming them from sites of neglect to a vibrant cultural locus. Revitalized structures now host artist’s residencies, film programming, a listening house and a housing collective. Employing adaptive reuse, and recuperating archival inventory, Gates has set up a collaborative platform for contemporary creativity and community-driven initiatives as the catalysts for cultural and socioeconomic renewal.

Gates’s talk, entitled The Sermon on Buildings, will open the exhibition Studio Systems, which explores the status of the artist’s studio in contemporary art. Long mythologized as the locus of artistic creation, the studio has undergone a sea change over the past fifty years as artists have reconfigured and diversified the sites of their activity. In conjunction with the Academy’s annual Open Studios, which provides free access to the inner workings of the artists’ studios throughout the McKim, Mead & White Building, Studio Systems will feature ways in which the studio has been constructed, redefined, and interrogated in recent art.

Gates is a professor in the Department of Visual Art and director of arts and public life at the University of Chicago. He has exhibited and performed at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Whitechapel Gallery, London; and Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany, among others.

The lecture will be held in English.

This event is made possible by the Embassy of the United States of America in Italy.

Studio System Events

Reading
Peter Schjeldahl – The Critic as Artist: Updating Oscar Wilde
May 12, 2016
6:30pm, AAR Lecture Room

Exhibition Opening
May 19, 2016
6:00–9:00pm, AAR Gallery

Performance
Dawn Kasper – On Desire or THE METHOD
May 26, 2016
6:30pm, AAR Gallery

Performance
Bryony Roberts – Corpo Estraneo
June 16, 2016
​6:00–8:00pm, TBA

Studio System Hours

Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, 4:00–7:00pm, until July 3, 2016.