I'm not trained as an architect, but I think about buildings a lot, architecture becomes a much more complex envelope, an envelope that can carry both the high and the low, the international and the very local, the rich and the poor. It's only when those things start to conflate in really beautiful ways that I think we can have a redeemed, redemptive architecture.

Theaster Gates

Categorized in : Living

It's not really about the material. It's about our capacity to shape things.

Theaster Gates

materials shapes capacity

I think I'm a full-time artist, a full-time urban planner, and a full-time preacher with an aspiration of no longer needing any of those titles. Rather, I'm trying to do what for some seems a very messy work or a complicated work.

Theaster Gates

artist trying thinking

I'm not a preacher, but I preach. I'm not a Buddhist, but I chant. I'm not race theorist, but I have questions and ponderances around the complexities of race and class and culture wherever I am.

Theaster Gates

buddhist race class

Sometimes the creating that we do is creating a platform that allows other creative people to pitch in.

Theaster Gates

creating creative people

I believe that beauty is a basic service.

Theaster Gates

i-believe believe

I think I'm passionately allowing myself to be influenced by the things that are around me.

Theaster Gates

allowing thinking

The reason artists want to have works in museums is that we want our works to be seen by as many people as possible and we want our ideas to be understood in more complicated ways.

Theaster Gates

artist museums ideas

What I think museums do very well is that they say to a public, "We have some stuff that's worth looking at."

Theaster Gates

stuff museums thinking

The fact that the work is affirmed by the Museum of Contemporary Art I think sends continued signals that this is worth paying attention to, looking at, and understanding.

Theaster Gates

museums art thinking

It's really exciting to know that people want to use the house as a house and want to live there although it hasn't been a used, occupied space in 50 or 60 years.

Theaster Gates

space people years

All kinds of performance practices have a certain register of power or solemnity.

Theaster Gates

solemnity kind practice

Modernism was influenced by what they call a primativist ethic.

Theaster Gates

modernism ethics

I have the willingness to think fully about where opportunities are and where they live.

Theaster Gates

willingness opportunity thinking

Everything is raw material to me. Land is raw material... I take one form and transform it into other forms.

Theaster Gates

everything take me land

There were a series of moments when I decided that art was important, and it was an important vehicle for me to express my interest in spaces.

Theaster Gates

me moments important art

I actually no longer use 'art' as the framing device. I think I'm just kind of practicing things, practicing life, practicing creation.

Theaster Gates

think creation life art

The reality in the neighborhood that I live in is: if I don't constantly reconcile what I have against what other people don't, either I need to leave and be around other people who have what I have, or I'm constantly engaged in this kind of dynamic flow of opportunity and sharing.

Theaster Gates

live opportunity reality people

If we imagine that the only right that we have is to make commodifiable objects, then we limit our practice, and we limit the great potential for an understanding between collectors, curators and galleries.

Theaster Gates

limit great understanding practice

I want to spend my time between the creation of ideas and the creation of things.

Theaster Gates

creation want time ideas

I sometimes am challenged to imagine where the timbre of art should be. Should it be about objects that point to this current moment, or how objects are related to ideas of this current moment?

Theaster Gates

moment sometimes ideas art