By Tori Lee

Nov 24, 2025

Photo by Jason Smith

Walking into Theaster Gates: Unto Thee, one immediately feels dwarfed. 

Floor-to-ceiling shelves packed with African art and cultural items fill the Smart Museum of Art’s lobby. Drawers filled with glass lantern slides stretch across the exhibition gallery. A slate roof squats like a tiled giant on the ground. 

A self-described “keeper of objects,” University of Chicago Prof. Theaster Gates brings together materials collected over his artistic career in his first solo exhibition in his hometown of Chicago. Through resculpted granite, wood, paper, metal and glass, Gates explores the nature of collecting and how the meaning of objects can change over time.

“Seven core materials are part of this exhibition, all of which are connected with the University of Chicago,” said exhibition co-curator Vanja Malloy, the Dana Feitler Director of the Smart Museum. 

These materials trace Gates' deep ties to UChicago and long practice of seeing value in objects—and spaces—that have been neglected and discarded, particularly ones relating to Black life. 

The exhibition comes on the heels of the Rebuild Foundation’s grand opening of The Land School, a former elementary school turned arts hub. Founded by Gates in 2010, the nonprofit has redeveloped several properties on the South Side, including the Stony Island Arts Bank and Kenwood Gardens, into community-centered cultural spaces. 

“In his practice, Theaster is thinking about if you give those materials some time, maybe there's a moment when they become the right object, the right material, to speak,” said Smart Museum curator Galina Mardilovich. 

Free and open to the public, Theaster Gates: Unto Thee runs through Feb. 22. at the Smart Museum.

Redemptive materials

The materials in Unto Thee carry many lives. 

Before coming into Gates’ care, the slate roof, made of 9,000 individual tiles, once topped Rockefeller Chapel. Thousands of eyes have stared at ancient objects through glass vitrines that once stood in the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures. 

Catalog drawers along an entire gallery wall hold a teaching collection of glass lantern slides. When the art history department needed more space, Gates took the collection. Digitized from their now obsolete form, the images of ancient pots and Renaissance paintings glow in a screening room filled with Bond Chapel’s original pews, which stand as silent sentinels.   

To collect something, to put it on display, marks an item as valuable. 

“These materials were seen as antiquated or no longer useful,” said Malloy, who says that Gates refers to their reuse as “redemptive.” 

In Unto Thee, UChicago-specific materials are interspersed with Gates’ most famous works.

On one wall are his famed tar paintings coated with the same thick, viscous material his father used every day as a roofer. In the middle of the exhibition space, bookshelves carefully reassemble the 4,500-volume archive of Robert Bird, a UChicago professor of Slavic languages and literatures and cinema and media studies—a dear friend and colleague of Gates who passed away in 2020. 

Known for his large-scale installations and ceramic sculptures, Gates has exhibited and performed across North America and Europe. However, Unto Thee marks the first time he has returned many items gathered from UChicago to their point of origin. 

“When you spend so much time and care with these materials, and you return them back to the entity from which you gained them, it demonstrates what holding on to things can do,” said Mardilovich, “how it adds more value and care.”

The exhibition also includes two UChicago-based materials that have never been exhibited before: concrete slabs from Lorado Taff Midway Studios, where artists, including famed ceramist Ruth Duckworth, taught studio courses to UChicago students for decades, and granite from the construction of the Logan Center for the Arts. 

Together, the two building materials trace the history—and future—of the arts at UChicago and Gates’ own career at the University.

When Smart Museum curators approached Gates about a solo exhibition, the title was one of the first sorted details. 

“The exhibition title Unto Thee has to do with this proposal: Is it possible that I can acknowledge these raw materials that were given to me under duress, acknowledge that during my time on Earth over the last twenty years, I’ve been a good steward of the things,” said Gates in a conversation with Christina Sharpe for the exhibition’s catalogue, “and then can I offer those things back to the source that they came from in their new charged, energetic state?”

‘A good steward’

At the opening of The Land School, Gates said that the former St. Laurence Elementary School had been slated for demolition after a decade of disuse, fated to life as a parking lot. 

Instead, thanks to Gates and the Rebuild Foundation, the building’s historic masonry is preserved and will host arts residences and programming. The project is one of many of Gates’ urban renewal projects. In 2011, Gates helped form UChicago’s Arts + Public Life. Through close community partnerships, the initiative now stewards the Arts Block, a stretch of Garfield Boulevard that hosts cultural programming in arts, outdoor and retail spaces. 

“Through his practice, he redeems these materials, but he also redeems spaces,” Malloy said. “He takes spaces that are going to get knocked down, that people don't see hope for, and gives them a new chapter—a new purpose.”

During Unto Thee’s planning process, the exhibition curators asked themselves: What can we do that no other museum could do? The answer wasn’t inside the museum, but outside of it. 

“A lot of Theaster’s cultural spaces that he's nurtured over the past two decades are in the South Side of Chicago, within a mile from where we are located,” said Mardilovich. “One thing we are doing as part of the show is using programming to take the exhibition beyond the museum walls to some of those spaces.”

Throughout the exhibition’s run, the Smart will host a slate of related programming, including site tours of the Rebuild Foundation’s off-campus locations.

“Art taught me that, in the same way the thing was produced, it could go back into the ground,” said Gates. “And that in a way, the world is utterly fallible, as are my ideas, as am I.”

Originally posted on UChicago News.