Theaster Gates is founder and president of the Rebuild Foundation and director of arts program development at the University of Chicago. He is an artist, musician, and “cultural planner.” In his performances, installations, and urban interventions, Gates transforms spaces, institutions, traditions, and perceptions. Gates’s training as an urban planner and sculptor, and his subsequent time spent in Japan studying clay, has given him keen awareness of the poetics of production and systems of organizing. With this experience, Gates has assembled gospel choirs, formed temporary unions, and used systems of mass production as a way of underscoring the need that industry has for the body. When Theaster is not making art for museums, he is committed to the restoration of poor black neighborhoods, converting abandoned buildings into cultural spaces. Gates was a Loeb fellow at Harvard Graduate School of Design and has received awards from the Joyce Foundation and the Graham Foundation.

In 2019, fashion label Prada announced Theaster Gates, alongside Ava DuVernay, will be co-chair of the Prada Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Council.

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