This speaker event is recorded live on Thursday, November 30, 2023, at 5:30 pm in the Michigan Theater, Ann Arbor, MI.
Artist and social innovator Theaster Gates lives and works in Chicago. Trained in urban planning and ceramics, his artistic practice translates the intricacies of Blackness through space theory and land development, sculpture, and performance. Through the expansiveness of his approach as a thinker, maker, and builder, he extends the role of the artist as an agent of change. His performance practice and visual work find roots in Black knowledge, objects, history, and archives. His work focuses on the possibility of the “life within things” and redeems spaces that have been left behind. He is the founder of the Rebuild Foundation, an artist-led, community-based platform for art, cultural development, and neighborhood transformation whose mission is to demonstrate the impact of innovative, ambitious and entrepreneurial cultural initiatives enriched by three core values: Black people matter, Black spaces matter, and Black objects matter.
Gates will be speaking as part of the Arts & Resistance Theme Semester, which features the exhibition Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina, currently on view at UMMA. This landmark exhibition includes more than 60 objects representing the work of African American potters in the decades surrounding the Civil War as well as several contemporary works from leading Black artists, including Gates, whose work connects the past to the present. The exhibition is a reckoning with the central role that enslaved and free Black potters played in the long-standing stoneware traditions of Edgefield, South Carolina. It is also an important story about the unrelenting power of artistic expression and creativity, even while under the brutal conditions of slavery. Hear Me Now highlights the joy, struggle, creative ambition, and lived experience of African Americans in the 19th-century American South.
The Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series Fall 2023 Season
This winter, the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series brings respected leaders and innovators from a broad spectrum of creative fields to Ann Arbor’s historic Michigan Theater for weekly in-person events.
Detroit Public Television and PBS Books, in partnership with the Stamps School, will stream each week’s event Fridays at 8pm.
See the full schedule of events livestreamed by PBS Books here.
Some programs may not be available online, depending on artist requests. Interested in receiving notifications before online videos go live? Sign up to receive a reminder before each event begins streaming.
