Theaster Gates
18 May - 06 Oct 2013
Theaster Gates
12 Ballads for the Huguenot House, 2012
Installation view, Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany
Image courtesy of Kavi Gupta CHICAGO | BERLIN
12 Ballads for the Huguenot House, 2012
Installation view, Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany
Image courtesy of Kavi Gupta CHICAGO | BERLIN
THEASTER GATES
13th Ballad
18 May - 6 October 2013
13th Ballad, an installation by Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates, is an extension of the artist’s 12 Ballads for Huguenot House, which was coproduced by the MCA for and exhibited at Documenta 13, the 2012 iteration of the international art exhibition that takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany.
Gates, whose practice includes performance, sculpture, installation, and large-scale urban interventions, created 12 Ballads for Huguenot House as part of his ongoing efforts toward architectural and social rejuvenation in his South Chicago neighborhood, which began in 2006 with his refurbishment of an abandoned studio and house for himself on Dorchester Avenue. This effort was later expanded to include an abandoned house nearby, which the artist and a team of laborers from the neighborhood prepared for renovation and rebirth as a cultural center, while also using the repurposed materials to make both functional objects and purely aesthetic creations. For 12 Ballads, those items and materials were in turn used in the renovation of a dilapidated historic building in Kassel called the Huguenot House, resulting in a poetic exchange of material and music. Before the Huguenot’s sister house in Chicago was carefully disassembled, Gates’s collaborators the Black Monks of Mississippi recorded a series of songs and performances in the South Side home, footage of which was then screened in Kassel and accompanied there by another set of performances.
For 13th Ballad, Gates creates a new large-scale installation in the MCA’s Kovler Atrium that comprises objects and materials from the Huguenot House, as well as a set of repurposed pews from the University of Chicago’s campus church, Bond Chapel. The pews were recently removed from the chapel in order to offer Muslim students a place to pray, a symbolic gesture of religious tolerance that resonates with the religious persecution of the Huguenots, members of the Protestant Reformed Church of France, who were forced to flee to Protestant nations such as Prussia (modern-day Germany) between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The installation features a monumental double cross sculpture, which, in combination with the carved wooden pews, creates an ecclesiastical-like ambience within the museum to suggest that art museums, not unlike churches, are sites of pilgrimage and worship. 13th Ballad is accompanied at the MCA by a series of collaborative performances. Providing context for the project, the MCA Screen gallery reprises key aspects of 12 Ballads for Huguenot House as well as video footage from the original Dorchester project. Functional objects Gates and his team created for Documenta 13 are showcased along with preparatory drawings and other ephemera.
This exhibition is co-organized by Michael Darling, James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator, and Kristin Korolowicz, Marjorie Susman Curatorial Fellow, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
Over the course of the summer, a series of three collaborative performances titled The Accumulative Affects of Migration 1–3 activate the atrium installation and build upon the artist’s restoration of the historic Huguenot House. Whereas the majority of the performances that took place in Kassel as part of 12 Ballads focused on soul and gospel music, The Accumulative Affects of Migration 1–3 explores connections between the migration narratives of the Huguenots and black Americans through an experimental patchwork of classical opera and Delta blues. For this component of 13th Ballad, the artist has worked closely with University of Chicago’s Germanic studies scholar David Levin and musician and composer Michael Drayton to create a new body of music based on Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots and blues compositions by Waters. An interdisciplinary group—including Yaw Agyeman, Khari Lemuel, Tomeka Reid, Joshua Abrams, Mikel Avery, Orron Kenyatta, and Kiara Lanier—performs the score, translating and improvising both lyrical content and formal components to musically unite these two seemingly disparate social histories.
13th Ballad
18 May - 6 October 2013
13th Ballad, an installation by Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates, is an extension of the artist’s 12 Ballads for Huguenot House, which was coproduced by the MCA for and exhibited at Documenta 13, the 2012 iteration of the international art exhibition that takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany.
Gates, whose practice includes performance, sculpture, installation, and large-scale urban interventions, created 12 Ballads for Huguenot House as part of his ongoing efforts toward architectural and social rejuvenation in his South Chicago neighborhood, which began in 2006 with his refurbishment of an abandoned studio and house for himself on Dorchester Avenue. This effort was later expanded to include an abandoned house nearby, which the artist and a team of laborers from the neighborhood prepared for renovation and rebirth as a cultural center, while also using the repurposed materials to make both functional objects and purely aesthetic creations. For 12 Ballads, those items and materials were in turn used in the renovation of a dilapidated historic building in Kassel called the Huguenot House, resulting in a poetic exchange of material and music. Before the Huguenot’s sister house in Chicago was carefully disassembled, Gates’s collaborators the Black Monks of Mississippi recorded a series of songs and performances in the South Side home, footage of which was then screened in Kassel and accompanied there by another set of performances.
For 13th Ballad, Gates creates a new large-scale installation in the MCA’s Kovler Atrium that comprises objects and materials from the Huguenot House, as well as a set of repurposed pews from the University of Chicago’s campus church, Bond Chapel. The pews were recently removed from the chapel in order to offer Muslim students a place to pray, a symbolic gesture of religious tolerance that resonates with the religious persecution of the Huguenots, members of the Protestant Reformed Church of France, who were forced to flee to Protestant nations such as Prussia (modern-day Germany) between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The installation features a monumental double cross sculpture, which, in combination with the carved wooden pews, creates an ecclesiastical-like ambience within the museum to suggest that art museums, not unlike churches, are sites of pilgrimage and worship. 13th Ballad is accompanied at the MCA by a series of collaborative performances. Providing context for the project, the MCA Screen gallery reprises key aspects of 12 Ballads for Huguenot House as well as video footage from the original Dorchester project. Functional objects Gates and his team created for Documenta 13 are showcased along with preparatory drawings and other ephemera.
This exhibition is co-organized by Michael Darling, James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator, and Kristin Korolowicz, Marjorie Susman Curatorial Fellow, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
Over the course of the summer, a series of three collaborative performances titled The Accumulative Affects of Migration 1–3 activate the atrium installation and build upon the artist’s restoration of the historic Huguenot House. Whereas the majority of the performances that took place in Kassel as part of 12 Ballads focused on soul and gospel music, The Accumulative Affects of Migration 1–3 explores connections between the migration narratives of the Huguenots and black Americans through an experimental patchwork of classical opera and Delta blues. For this component of 13th Ballad, the artist has worked closely with University of Chicago’s Germanic studies scholar David Levin and musician and composer Michael Drayton to create a new body of music based on Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots and blues compositions by Waters. An interdisciplinary group—including Yaw Agyeman, Khari Lemuel, Tomeka Reid, Joshua Abrams, Mikel Avery, Orron Kenyatta, and Kiara Lanier—performs the score, translating and improvising both lyrical content and formal components to musically unite these two seemingly disparate social histories.