Featured Event
DEMO2024
06/05/2024
11AM
Conversations
Theaster Gates in Conversation with Saidiya Hartman
Presented with the University of Chicago
Cover Image:
Photo: Lyndon French; Courtesy: Saidiya Hartman
NOTE: Unfortunately, due to unforeseen circumstances, this event has been canceled. If you purchased a ticket to this event, your order has been refunded. If you have questions about your ticket, please contact us at tickets@newmuseum.org.
The New Museum and the University of Chicago invite you to a closing event and celebratory conversation on “Theaster Gates: Young Lords and Their Traces.” Join exhibition artist Theater Gates in discussion with esteemed writer and scholar Saidiya Hartman.
We invite you to join us for impromptu performances featuring Gates and his musical collaborators, The Black Monks, throughout the weekend from February 3—5 at the New Museum.
Tickets
If you purchased a ticket to this event, your order has been refunded and you will receive a confirmation email shortly. If you have questions about your ticket, please contact us at tickets@newmuseum.org.
About the Speakers
Theaster Gates lives and works in Chicago. His practice includes sculpture, installation, performance, urban intervention and land development. Through his work as an artist, archivist, and curator, Gates seeks to instigate the creation of cultural communities by acting as catalysts for social engagement that leads to political and spatial change. Trained as both a sculptor and an urban planner, Gates’s practice contends with the notion of Black space as a formal exercise defined by collective desire, and artistic agency. Gates has recently exhibited in Serpentine Pavilion, London (2022); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2021–2022); Victoria & Albert Museum, London (2021–2022); Prada Rhong Zhai, Shanghai (2021); Tate Liverpool, UK (2019–2020); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2019–2020); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2019–2020); and Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2019). His work has been shown in the Venice Biennale (2015), Documenta (2012), and the Whitney Biennial (2010). Gates is the recipient of awards and honorary degrees including the Friedrich Kiesler Prize for Architecture and Art (2021); Royal Institute of British Architects (2021); World Economic Forum Crystal Award (2020); J.C. Nichols Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development (2018); and the Nasher Sculpture Prize (2018). He was a visiting artist in residence at the American Academy in Rome (2020) and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2021. Gates is a professor at the University of Chicago in the Department of Visual Arts and serves as Special Advisor to its President for Arts Initiatives.
Saidiya Hartman was born and raised in New York City. She is the author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (Norton, 2019) which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, the Mary Nickliss Prize from the Organization of American Historians, the Judy Grahn Prize for Lesbian Nonfiction, and the John Hope Franklin Prize from the American Studies Association. She has also authored Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007), and Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford, 1997). Hartman has been a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, a Fulbright Scholar in Ghana, a Whitney Oates Fellow at Princeton University, a Critical Inquiry Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago, and a Rockefeller Fellow at Brown University. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019. She is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Society of Literature. Currently, Hartman is University Professor at Columbia University.