An urban planner by training, Theaster Gates rose to renown as an artist in 2009 through his redevelopment project on Chicago’s South Side. He is considered a leading voice in socially engaged contemporary art. Gates’s practice ranges from paintings and ceramics to installation and performance. Reusing materials that have strong social meanings and carry collective memories, he has gained critical acclaim for his series of marble slabs salvaged from demolished banks and inscribed with bond certificates, and his assemblages made of decommissioned fire hoses, which recall the brutal measures taken against peaceful demonstrators during the civil rights movement in the 1960s.
For the ‘Ground Rules’ series, begun around 2014, of which ‘Ground Rules, Out of Bounds’ (2017) is a striking example, Gates creates compositions from gymnasium floors sourced from shuttered high school buildings. The markings on the wooden boards, which represent the rules by which a game is played, are sectioned and rearranged in order to form geometric patterns reminiscent of modern abstract paintings. Gates’s work is imbued with multiple layers of meaning including the importance of access to education and sports in all communities.
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