Theaster Gates Spotlights Freedman City at Houston Art Exhibition

Theaster Gates’ latest exhibition took place just as the artist decided to rethink his approach to putting on shows. The Chicago native, whose installations and sculptures have been exhibited around the world during his nearly two-decade career, wanted to tackle longer-term projects, slow down the pace and take on a challenge that would dictate the future of a place. or a people. For “Theaster Gates: The Gift and the Renege,” this location was Houston’s historic Mother District, specifically Freedmen’s Town in the Fourth Ward, built in 1865 by newly freed blacks who formed and fostered a self-sustaining, fully functioning neighborhood and dynamic. community.

Gates—winner of the 2018 Nasher Prize, the 2023 Isamu Noguchi Prize, and a whole list of other honors—has focused his practice on revitalizing underserved areas by merging urban planning and art for years. Reimagining the future of a place or a people is also at the basis of the Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston’s latest project, “Rebirth in Action: Telling the Story of Freedom,” of which “The Gift and the Renege” is part. Gates’ show, launched in partnership with Freedman’s Town Conservancy, aims to honor and preserve the heritage of this unique Texas venue while showcasing the seen and unseen dynamics of Freedmen’s Town. Along with “The Gift and the Renege,” “Rebirth in Action” will also host meetings with community stakeholders, walking tours and “THIS WAY: A Houston Group Show,” showcasing the work of a dozen he local black artists interpreting the legacy of the Freedmen. City community.

On view at CAM Houston through Oct. 20, “Theaster Gates: The Gift and the Renege” features new and recent installations, paintings and sculptures — “a series of poetic gestures,” as Gates described them during a recent interview from the museum office. . These “gestures” include Retaining wall for revolution and resurrection, (a steel crate containing supplies from family stores of yesteryear, which Gates says “held the world together”) And New Egypt Sanctuary of the Holy Word and Image, (an imposing wooden “shrine” filled with ebony leather-bound magazines, what the artist calls a “metaphor for black precarity,” contributing to his practice of “hoarding people’s problems”). All exhibits draw on the labor history, material legacies, and sociopolitical architecture of this historic, resident-created environment.

Gates was approached by Hesse McGraw, executive director of CAM Houston and co-curator of the show, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, about “The Gift and the Renege.” The idea “amplified the great work being done at Freedmen’s Town around the preservation and conservation of their bricks,” Gates says, “alongside a broader initiative to bring this place out of obscurity and help the rest of the literate world to know that it exists – (because) you all need to know. Working on the Freedmen’s Town project ultimately coalesced with the artist’s desire for a slower practice, with an impact that could be felt, heard and seen beyond the white walls of a museum. “We were able to imagine the role that artists could play in helping to tell the story of Freedmen’s Town,” McGraw adds. “(It ended up) reinforcing a longer-term strategy, which is preservation, revival, reactivation, and building this broader narrative about this very special neighborhood.”

The current founding of Freedmen’s Town, now home to old and new housing, churches and monuments, the Gregory School African American Library, and stunning murals that tell stories of black history.—were its brick streets, built by the hands of locals who created an entire infrastructure without influence or infiltration from outside forces (which runs counter to the idea that newly freed slaves could not survive beyond limits of slavery). Over the years, the once bustling community has been affected by gentrification and government-sanctioned land laws, which took land away from the black community and forced their displacement to make way for new developments. For example, in the late 1950s, approximately 40,000 black residents were evicted from their homes to allow for the construction of a new highway.

Gates says that, when it comes to Freedmen’s Town, these art activations and exhibitions can highlight the need for conservation on a broader scale. The eradication of black spaces and places, he says, is not a singular phenomenon.

“What happens if I take my knowledge home and Freedman’s Town feels like a place where not only do we rethink its history, but it becomes a repository of black intelligences? » says the artist. “They are nation builders. And they built this great nation – and they built a nation for themselves. (This concept of “nation building” and the arduous work it involved is represented in the exhibition through a series of brick presses that Gates reproduced three times from an original cast iron model used to lay out field.)

“For a people who have not always considered themselves masters of their destiny, this outside world constantly gets in the way – no,” Gates says. “If they destroyed old Egypt, we would build new Egypt. We have the tools, we have the libraries, we have the sermon. The artist punctuates his message by reiterating a credo he engraved on a large piece of steel for a work of art that features prominently and clearly in “Theaster Gates: The Gift and the Renege”: “We we will save! »