Artist Theaster Gates is known for reclaiming old materials, using them to create works that ask the viewer to reconsider their purpose. In 2013, he repurposed pews from Bond Chapel at the University of Chicago, where he is a professor of visual arts, for a piece at the Museum of Contemporary Art. It makes sense, then, that he would take a similar approach with his unconventional mid-career survey — the first homegrown solo show for arguably Chicago’s best-known living artist. Sourcing from his own archive, he’s created a new series of large-scale installations for Theaster Gates: Unto Thee. Held at UChicago’s Smart Museum of Art, the exhibition serves not as a retrospective of his practice, which famously aims to steward Black objects and spaces. Rather, it’s an introspection on the life of the materials he’s used over the past 20 years, as well as on the life of the institution that has supported him.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about how important accumulation has been in my work,” says Gates, 52. “The University of Chicago was so important for a significant part of my collections.” In Unto Thee, the pews from Bond Chapel — along with concrete slabs from sculptor Lorado Taft’s Midway Studios and slate from Rockefeller Memorial Chapel — are, once again, reimagined. The exhibition also includes all-new works, such as ceramics, films, and Gates’s iconic tar paintings. In the lobby, he’s creating a site-specific installation pairing his personal record collection with a recently acquired array of contemporary and traditional African reliquaries and masks. 

Throughout this process, Gates has pondered a question: “How do I start to account for the work that we’ve done and reflect on it in public ways?” His answer: by conceiving of new possibilities for these materials and presenting them, as he puts it, “not in their deficit but in their glory.”

Theaster Gates: Unto Thee runs September 23 to February 22 at the Smart Museum of Art.