Join us for a tour of the exhibition Theaster Gates: Assembly Hall at the Walker Art Center!
This tour is FREE and open to museum guides + one guest. Space is limited. Please RSVP by Wednesday, October 16th. Please remember that by signing up for this tour you are making a commitment to your colleagues. If you need to change your plans, please cancel your reservation so that your spot can be given to someone on the waitlist.
On the day of the tour, please meet your guides in the main lobby of the Walker, just inside the main entrance at 725 Vineland Place.
About the Exhibition
Theaster Gates’s (US, b. 1973) multifaceted practice includes sculpture, installation, performance, and architectural interventions. An important aspect of his work entails reclaiming and revitalizing abandoned buildings in neighborhoods across Chicago’s South Side. These spaces, which include Dorchester Projects and the Stony Island Arts Bank, have become catalysts for creative and cultural gatherings, and now also serve as repositories for thousands of objects. Taking things that have been cast aside from libraries, archives, and collections, the artist asks us to consider what it means to invest objects with new meanings through the simple acts of conversation, conservation, creation, and care.
Assembly Hall brings a number of the artist’s collections into a museum context for the first time. The Walker’s galleries are transformed into a total work of art, transposing his collections and studio environment into four immersive rooms, each infused with his own poetic interventions. The exhibition considers what Gates calls “resurrections,” or the act of bringing old objects and spaces back to life, while examining the historical and social context of their making in the process. Included are selections from 60,000 slides of art/architectural history from the University of Chicago Glass Lantern Slides Collection; books and periodicals, furniture, and other ephemera from the 15,000-piece Johnson Publishing Company Collection; a range of objects from the Ana J. and Edward J. Williams Collection of “negrobilia”; and ceramic pots and other wares that the artist has made or collected over the past decade. Seen together, these items speak to Gates’s “deep belief in the objects and histories of African American material culture” and capture moments of celebration and inspiration, exclusion and marginalization, renewal and invention.
Parking
Underground parking is available on-site at a daily rate of $5. Enter the ramp on Vineland Place at Bryant Avenue. Accessible parking in the underground ramp is designated near the elevator and entrance. Free, but limited, on-street parking is available on the surrounding streets (restrictions enforced).
Metro Transit bus lines are 4, 6, 12 & 25.
We look forward to seeing you at the Walker!
