Theaster Gates Says Land Is More Than Property in Talk With Henry Louis Gates Jr.

University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and artist Theaster Gates discussed the need to protect artistic freedom in contrast to political expectations placed on Black artists at a Tuesday talk at the Cambridge Public Library.

Gates Jr., the director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, joined Gates at the event to discuss Gates Jr.’s new book, which focuses on the studios, living spaces, and creative processes of 20 current Black artists.

The talk, titled “Another View: The Vibrant World of Contemporary Black Artists,” was hosted by the Harvard Bookstore and CPL. The two talked about how Black artists use art, land, and cultural spaces to build self-determined futures.

During the talk, Gates Jr. asked Gates how he thinks future historians might define himself and the other artists in the book. Gates responded by contrasting individual self-determinism and collective self-determinatism, highlighting the importance of not confining Black artists to one medium.

“I think that what we’ve done is we’ve muddied the waters so that we bring all of the things that we are to the table,” Gates said. “I want to make music. I want to talk about urbanism. I want to talk about fame. I want to make news. I want to pay homage — and I want to do that in a self-determined way.”

Gates said that, from an early age, he felt that “creativity was tied to something beyond myself.” While he majored in urban planning as an undergraduate at Iowa State University, he stayed for a fifth year to complete a double minor in religious studies and ceramics.

And as the talk centered around Gates’s and the other artists’ physical artistic spaces, Gates spoke to the ways that his background in urban planning has complemented his creative practices.

Gates has anchored much of his work in the idea that unused or disinvested land should be repurposed to create cultural hubs. He pointed to his effort in restoring buildings on Chicago’s South Side as ways to create intentional spaces and give back to the city’s Black community.

While in the process of purchasing a historic 1923 bank on Chicago’s South Side in 2013, he defended the decision not to buy a newer building as the idea of, “investing in the architectural image of one’s soul, of one’s psyche.”

“I wanted these buildings as a kind of cultural anchors, and I wanted to protect this land,” Gates said.

Gates said he hopes his projects preserve histories and give Black communities greater agency.

Though tearing the old bank down and developing a new building would have been cheaper than the restoration, he said he chose to restore the property so that children in the community would see “that somebody cared enough from their neighborhood— not an outside force, not outside lenders, but somebody from their neighborhood” cared enough to preserve it.