Theaster Gates is an urbanist, collector, artist, professor, and curator. The son of a hot tar roofer, he dedicated a 2016 exhibition at the Kunsthaus Brengenz to the material of tar. References to the material were found in various different works on several floors of the show. The black baby head in the evn collection also originates from that event. It was made by a wood carver from the Bregenzerwald region and poured over with hot tar by the artist. There are several variants of the head sculpture in different sizes. Gates, who provided for the mingling of art and crafts into urban life by transforming the so-called “Huguenot House” in Kassel into an academy for the documenta 13 (2012), took the model for his sculpture from a piece of the collection of Chicago-based black bank executive Edward Williams who started buying up all sorts of racist everyday objects in the 1970s and ’80s in order to take them off the market. Theaster Gates has preserved this collection in his Rebuild Foundation, together with volumes of Ebony and Jet magazine, record collections and many other items that represent and characterize Afro-American life and culture. The building on the Chicago South Side was opened to the public by Gates, who thus established a significant cultural archive, an educational center for present-day and future generations.

evn sammlung, 2019 (translation: Michael Strand)