How a multidisciplinary practice can amplify the impact of art

In this Q&A, Sam Gilliam Lecture Series speaker and artist Theaster Gates shares his experience combining urban planning with art and discusses the role artists play in both preserving histories and advancing progress.

Theaster Gates may be first known as an artist, but his work is tightly interwoven with his training in other disciplines. Gates studied both urban planning and theology, two areas of study he says help expand his perspective and amplify the impact of his artistic practice.

Here, Gates, who recently spoke at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center’s Sam Gilliam Lecture Series, shares the ways he has leveraged multiple disciplines to support city revitalization and the broader importance of cross-disciplinary art. He also explores the role artists can play in both preserving uncelebrated histories and reimagining the future.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

Drawing on your work reviving neglected neighborhoods in your hometown of Chicago, what is the unique role or perspective art and artists can offer in neighborhood and city revitalization? Can you speak to why city leaders would benefit from including artists in these types of urban projects?

While my training is in art, my primary training is in urban planning. That combination of being a person who’s trained to think about how cities work, how they don’t work, the history of failed and successful cities, and the future of cities is very important to my DNA.

In addition to the great American city, whatever that is—at one point it was St. Louis, at one point it was New York, at one point it was Chicago—there’s also a very strong economic, racial, and social critique of those cities that, while they were great, they were also failing for some. I think Chicago falls into this conundrum of being both a superpower of American cities and being a city that had, for me, challenges when I was growing up.

So I studied urban planning. And what happens when an urban planner is also given the tools of being a conceptual thinker? That’s where, at least for me, things get very interesting as an artist who has an awareness and a deep knowledge of a set of systems that are very specific. Then you’re able to apply creative energy on top of those systems to respond in new ways to them.

So when people ask, “Why aren’t more artists doing this?” or “Why haven’t artists been able to figure it out?” the truth is that artists often have the passion, the wherewithal, and the willingness to stay in a problem longer. We often believe in neighborhoods that other people don’t believe in, and we’re there from the beginning. But then you take that spirit and combine it with knowledge of engineering, knowledge of the biological sciences, or, in my case, knowledge of urbanism, new urbanism, tactical urbanism, the challenges of community and regional planning, and the challenges of the city. My artistic practice was born out of a deep belief that cities could be better, and artists were part of the solution for making them better. But it means that one has to have an understanding of city governance, city financing, and city politics, and you have to be willing to follow all of the dysfunction in order to solve for a particular thing.

My project on the South Side of Chicago and Grand Crossing was my attempt at taking a problem at my doorstep and asking whether I can, as an artist and urban planner, think critically about that problem and add anything to the conversation beyond protest and beyond complaint. My decision was to try to build an organization that could provide cultural programming, acquire abandoned buildings for that programming, and then build deep relationships so that the people who stayed in the neighborhood felt good about staying. And because they feel good about staying in this improving neighborhood, people who left might come back.

How have you seen the reimagining of public spaces fuel social transformation or other community benefits?

For 10 years now, we’ve had a building called the Stony Island Arts Bank, and on the weekends, it has a really nice watering hole. We have a bar, and we would have these house music parties on the weekends. People would show up in droves—300 or 400 people. It was like a day club. When I would sit at the bar and I would meet people, they would often say, “Oh, you know, I’m your new neighbor. I’ve moved to the neighborhood. I heard about the work you guys were doing, and we decided to buy our house because you guys were doing that work. We had left the city, and now we’re coming back.”

So on one level, I feel like a case study is folks who knew the conditions of Grand Crossing, which were not the most favorable, left it or left neighborhoods like Grand Crossing, and then chose to come back because there was a cultural anchor there. Then there are other folk. Another kind of type is the weirdo, or the affluent lover of their neighborhood, or the person who inherited their grandmother’s house. The cool people that we would normally go to another part of the city to meet, those folk actually lived south, but we would all go north because we were all looking for places to eat and places to hang out and be ourselves. They finally felt like there were places in their neighborhood that were for them. So people would come up to me and say, “Look, I’ve been here all my life” or “I’ve been here for the last 15 years, and I’ve been looking for a place like this, where in my neighborhood I could go see critical film, I could go hear a beautiful poetry reading, I could be a part of the queer community and the life that’s happening in this part of neighborhood, that I can experience wonderful culture in my neighborhood.” That case is one that I love very much, because finally the amenities have arrived, and we don’t have to go to another neighborhood to be sophisticated, to be free to be our most educated selves, and be Black and have a good time.

So these house parties would attract folk from the University of Chicago, we’d have white folk that would hang out, and the Latinx community was present. It was just this place that became a kind of hub because it was the only thing of its kind happening on Stony Island. I’m quite proud of that.

We could talk about transformation, like the buildings that we’ve acquired and restored and the violence prevention and decrease in crime. Those things are also true and important, but the part that excites me is that people feel like they can be social again in a neighborhood where they used to think they needed to leave.

Your work also focuses on preserving uncelebrated histories. Why are artists perhaps uniquely positioned to be the excavators of those histories, and what significance do you see in their preservation in this rapidly evolving digital age? 

Artists are often in need of raw material to realize the thing that they want to do. Often the raw material has been found objects. I think for a long time, we didn’t imagine that our histories were the necessary raw material, the physical raw material that could be used to advance our practices.

Now this investment in collections and the archive, and the Black archive, has everything to do with understanding that we’re in a moment where what’s needed of art is a reminder of our history. It’s a reminder of the truth of the past, as that past is, in many ways, in jeopardy or in threat of being either alienated or destroyed. I think that what culture does in its resilience is at the very moment where there’s the potential for the eradication of people’s histories, the artist is choosing to use history as their raw material. It couldn’t be more prescient that creative people imagine that the more rarefied, the more mundane, the historical artifact, the better for their practice. That works right in tandem with the truth of this eradication, because soon it will be the only evidence of certain parts of our historic existence.

“I think that what culture does in its resilience is at the very moment where there’s the potential for the eradication of people’s histories, the artist is choosing to use history as their raw material.”

So I would like to imagine that we’re all understanding that it’s urgent that we capture these pieces of dismembered moments and take those fragments and hold them together in art so that there’s irrefutable evidence of the truth of the past.

You come from a multidisciplinary background. How does art provide a fresh lens for understanding or approaching other academic disciplines, such as urban development, political science, or environmental science?

Every field needs people who are dedicated to that field. But I think you immediately start to approach something that is somewhat creative when you have the possibility of a second discipline. The creative moment isn’t only that we’re trained as painters and sculptors. That’s definitely part of it. But I think the creative moment is when we imagine that one passion or vocation or disciplinary measure is able to aid another passion and disciplinary measure. And this willingness to connect dots across disciplines, for me, feels like the crux of a creative thinker or an artistic thinker.

When I studied sculpture alongside religion and urban planning, I was able to see that our cities need compassion, not only policy. Maybe if I were just an urban planner and I hadn’t studied divinity, I would be thinking just about policy. Instead, I think our cities deserve compassion and creativity. And because I was a beneficiary of the arts and I understood how much the arts had impacted me, I understood that art could be a major impact for the future of place.

This combination of the city, the need for compassion and creativity, and the resulting buoyancy gave me a perspective that there were more people involved in the solutions for the city than just urbanists or politicians. That our philanthropic community was important, that our historians were important. That everyday people who we sometimes disregard as not having strong positions about how neighborhoods should be governed probably know best what their challenges are and how their neighborhoods should be run. It broadened my lens for receiving data and being able to redeploy that data in more creative ways.

Institutions like Johns Hopkins are really important because the spaces where artists have the ability to have conversations about cross-disciplinarity and the protected spaces where their practices can flourish are being impeded upon. There are fewer and fewer of those spaces. So I think that developing lecture series like the Sam Gilliam Lecture Series, where you can invite artists to talk freely about their practice and the things happening in their lives and in their studios, is very, very important. I think you have to protect that space.

Reflecting back on your lecture at the Hopkins Bloomberg Center, how do you see your work as an extension of Sam Gilliam’s legacy?

I learned a few things about Sam before he passed. He was equally passionate about his students, social justice, and painting. Sam has been an example of what happens when no one shines a light on your practice. Do you continue to make even though no one shines a light? And if you continue to make, it probably means that you’re able to make without the noise of the market and without the noise of all these external trappings that are constantly sucking your time. I’m jealous that Sam had 30 years to make and no one was bothering him. As a result, the portfolio that he was able to create in darkness is the kind of portfolio that, in a way, could never happen for an artist if they were constantly bombarded with accolades.

Part of what I am striving for is a whole life, a fulfilled life. And for me, that fulfillment has to do with not only what art gives me, but the ways in which I’m in service to the arts. So what I’ve learned from Sam is that maybe I need a self-induced period of darkness, of quiet, where I can ask myself, “Who am I making this for? What am I doing with my time? What are the things that I really want to make? And can I do that independent of the noise?” Sam got to see the world become excited when the shed was open and the light was shown. He had a life of making that he could account for, and he’s one of the great examples of an artist who had a calling and lived by that calling and did not live by social media likes and dislikes.

If we find ourselves in a situation where the only ambition within an artistic practice is a market ambition, then we are like many other professions. We’re not doing the best service that we can to the profession. As artists, we’re meant to do a lot more than make paintings that are just beautiful and sit on people’s walls.