…Chicago artist Theaster Gates takes into his care collections of objects amassed or discarded by others. Through artistic intervention, he reveals their latent cultural value, elevating the objects to an archive that holds truths largely overlooked by history or institutional structures. By reinvesting in these objects, Gates has built a practice that centers what he refers to as “material redemption.”1

This quote from the introductory wall text of Gates’s exhibition clearly states the artist’s motivation. We are presented with a collection of collections that document his two-decade tenure with the University of Chicago, along with a few other collections that are essential to the artist’s psyche.

        The first piece in the show is 2025’s Salon Mantle. It is comprised of Josef Albers’s Homage to the Square (1961) (the first work of art that Gates bought as a young man), materials from the late Japanese journalist Ei Nagata, wood-fired stoneware, a slab of marble from a demolished building, and a letter Gates tried to translate into Japanese, all on a steel base. It feels like a mantlepiece in someone’s home with mementos of dear friends or relatives on display, encapsulating what Gates appears to want you to feel about the entire exhibition—a sense of history and family.

        To the left of the piece on the adjacent wall is an installation of three paintings and a long credenza. The credenza is from the Johnson Publishing Company. Above it, on either side, are three paintings by Gates, from left to right: Painting for My Father, Roof Portrait, and Defend the Black Community. It was mentioned to me by one of the curators that Gates did not think of these as paintings because of the materials used: rubber, wood, copper nails and, on the center one, felt and bitumen. Gates’s father was a roofer and the first two were created in his memory. Gates’s trepidation about calling them paintings was because he used tar. There is nothing wrong with these materials in contemporary painting; they have been used a number of times before, especially tar. Donald Sultan produced a whole series called The Disaster Paintings using tar and latex paint on Masonite. What is significant here is the homage Gates pays to his father by bringing the roofing materials into his art. Displaying them along with the Johnson Publishing credenza further ties Gates’s heritage with the sophisticated publishing and art world.

        At the opposite end of the gallery spanning the width of the room , Black Revolution in Color is made from silkscreened images from the Johnson Publishing Company Archive. Sadly, it is placed so high that one cannot make out the images in any detail. Still, with the Johnson Publishing credenza placed on the opposite wall, this piece makes a fitting bookend to the exhibition. Below this mural is the Glass Lantern Slide Archive. This collection of 72,000 glass lantern slides from the University of Chicago Department of Art History was put in Gates’s care in 2009. He has since digitized the entire collection, samples of which are shown in the darkened room behind this wall. What we see is the card catalog-like cabinets that once housed the slides stretching all the way across the wall between the viewing room doors and, from a distance acting as an enormous plinth for Black Revolution in Color.

        In the darkened viewing room are the pews from the University of Chicago’s Bond Chapel which were removed for more flexible seating during a 2013 renovation. One can sit in these pews and view a sampling of the Glass Lantern Slide Archive. We can see what the University’s pedagogical approach was in the twentieth century. For me, it was also a nostalgic event; my sister was married in Bond Chapel in 1976.

        Along the south wall of the gallery to the right of Art Histories: A Reprise and framed by doorways to the rest of the Museum’s gallery space is Slate Roof. This work  is made of a selection of slate tiles from approximately 9,000 donated to Gates by the University from an early 2000s renovation of Rockerfeller Chapel (the place where I was married in 1970). In memory of his father’s trade as a roofer, Gates has had that selection of tiles reassembled into a massive sloping roof-like structure. The piece is both large and small in scale. It occupies an entire wall of the gallery, yet the individual tiles are less than a foot square and show the wear and tear of 80 years in the weather, each telling an individual story of endurance. This dual scale perception occurs in many of the pieces in the exhibition. In the Glass Lantern Slide Archive, for example, we see the sweep of the drawers, then we are led to examine the individual drawers that resemble the traditional library card catalog. And in the two collections of books, we are caught by their expanse, and then become curious about the individual volumes.

        On the north wall of the gallery between two doorways is a long four-shelf collection of books titled Walking Prayer, all in the same dark blue binding with gold embossed phrases on their spine. These phrases coalesce, sometimes clearly and sometimes not, into a kind of poem, full of shifts and non sequiturs: “In My Dreams / Don’t Change / Remain the Loyal / Colored Girl / I’ve Always Known / Holy, in Deed / Holy, in Color / Holy, Among Your Brothers and Sisters / Holy, Holy, La Toya / Holy Torkwase / Holy is Your Name / Holy is Our Love” reads one section; “It is Time for a New Order / And Lord Knows I Hope to See It / A Dissociative Identity Disorder / A White Lie / A Black Power / A Black Labor / A Wealth of Possibility / Break Chains.”2 Gates considers this work “a spine poem in honor of my mother, my sisters, and all the Black Madonnas in my life.”3

        In the center of the gallery are two long back-to-back bookshelves containing the Robert Bird Archive—4,500 books and magazines from the collection of Robert Bird. Bird, a noted scholar of Russian literature at the University of Chicago, died from colon cancer in September of 2020 at the age of 51. In the last months of his life, he agonized over how to preserve this library that he had so carefully collected. Ultimately, he donated it to Theaster Gates to be housed in the artist’s Stony Island Arts Bank so that it may be accessible to all. Within the rows of books is a poignant letter from Bird’s wife detailing his final thoughts (unfortunately set so low that it is almost impossible to read) and a rubber stamp with his initial, presumably to mark his books—his version of an ex libres. Another collection to add to Gates’s collections.

        Next to the Robert Bird Archive sits African Still Life #4. It is an amalgam of vitrines from the former Oriental Institute (now the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures), granite from the Logan Center for the Arts, selected African objects from the Guenneguez collection, and works from the artist’s studio—all on a steel support frame about three feet high that includes two stairways without treads. The work fits the visual tone of the exhibition with its dark grey steel and wood, but the “collection” it comprises is not as narrowly focused, almost random. The wall text claims that it plays “with the different objects to compose a singular form, [and] encourages questions about power, religion, economy, excess, and painting.” To this viewer, it is not clear how. It is interesting to look at what is contained in the vitrines (one with wire sculptures, the other seemingly empty but set so high that one cannot really tell). It breaks the consistency of the “collection of collections” at the other end of the gallery. However, it does relate more to African Still Life #3 which is outside the gallery in the lobby in that it can be thought of as a sampling of a much larger amalgam. But why the elevated steel platform that prevents the closer inspection of the objects?

        Finally, as just mentioned, outside the gallery in the lobby is African Still Life #3, A Tribute to Patric McCoy and Marva Jolly. This massive installation, which is to be on display through July of 2026, is independent yet also part of “Unto Thee.” It is a tightly grouped jumble of African masks, statues, and artifacts surrounding a vinyl collection of largely African and Caribbean music. Much of this piece is highly repetitive and makes me think of hoarders I have known who were never satisfied with only one of an item. But there is another way to think about this grouping. African Still Life #3 is both the prelude and coda to the exhibition. It is a collection of African heritage, to be treasured and not forgotten—not to be hidden away in a closet or storage bin, as the tightly grouped masks and statues suggest has been the case. This display brings African culture out into the open to be examined and admired and incorporated into the mainstream of American culture.

        Within a broader perspective, the collection of collections that makes up “Theaster Gates: Unto Thee” speaks to the necessity of keeping all culture and knowledge alive. One thinks of the tragedy of the Library of Alexandria and its loss of ancient knowledge when it was dispersed and destroyed. The exhibition also alludes to the “digital” nature of information, even before the advent of the computer age. It is just that the “digits” are much larger—books, paintings, tiles, masks, vessels, sculptures. For me, the need to treasure and preserve cultural information is ultimately what the show is about.

(Note: In the interest of full disclosure, Patric McCoy is on the Board of the New Art Association, the organization that publishes the New Art Examiner.)

Michel Ségard is the Editor in Chief of the New Art Examiner and a former adjunct assistant professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has been a published art critic for more than 45 years and is also the author of numerous exhibition catalog essays.