Theaster Gates
A Roof for the Middle Class, 2012
Wood, roofing paper, tar and paper
246.5 x 245 cm
Many of Theaster Gates’ best-known projects are tied into his commitment to his neighbourhood, the South Side of Chicago. An area in which he has been focussing on regeneration and social transformation through an art practice that also encompasses sculpture, performance and archives. He is interested in spaces that have been left behind, and contending with what he terms Black space 'defined by collective desire, artistic agency, and the tactics of a pragmatist'.1 This has particular weight in the South Side, still a relatively low-income area grappling with a long history of politicised and structural oppression of minorities.
1 See www.theastergates.com/about, last accessed 27 April 2021
In the last fifteen years he has regenerated almost forty buildings in the area, turning them into community provisions, artist studios or low-cost housing. But Gates has famously stated 'I don’t want to just buy a building, I want to make a building.'2 Having studied pottery in Japan and urban planning in Chicago earlier in his life, Gates manages all stages of the manufacturing process including making his own bricks.
2 Gates interviewed by Jonathan Griffin in Apollo Magazine, 6 March 2017. Available at www.apollo-magazine.com/level-im-just-looking-good-problems-solve/, last accessed 27 April 2021
A Roof for the Middle Class ties a lot of these strands together. The abstract expressionist black surface is made from tar, crafted in a collaborative process with his father, who is a retired roofer. With that knowledge the title could point to a means to an end; working to support a family. Gates often makes art from salvaged materials from his derelict buildings, with the sale of those pieces going back into refurbishing, taking it full circle by literally putting roofs over heads. But it goes further. Concealed by the tar is ‘The Black Middle Class’ issue of Ebony magazine from 1973, that analysed aspirations of social mobility for Black communities in America, solidifying the convergence of race and class that is prevalent in so many of his works.