WORKS
table
PRESS
- KLUB WRKR in Conversation
- lumpen radio interview: RAISIN
- Sixty Inches from Center: Review of RAISIN at 6018North
- WBEZ Chicago: ‘Raisin’ Exhibit Brings Seminal Chicago Play To Live
- e-flux Education: Portable Gray issue 6: Another Idea Exhibition Catalog
- Humanity in Action: Landecker Fellow Asha Iman Veal Announces Participating Artists for Upcoming ‘Raisin’ Exhibition
- In Practice: UChicago Arts Blog: Whoa de Whoa: The Gray Center’s “Another Idea” Comes To A Close
- In Practice: UChicago Arts Blog: Lunar Snails and Galactic Cocktails: Throwing a House Party on the Moon
- Mousse Magazine: “Another Idea: an actual conceptual art exhibition” at Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry
- Newcity Art: One Recommendation: July 2020
- Art Monthly, No. 434, March 2020: Letter from Chicago: Sweet Water by Agnieszka Gratza
- Sixty Inches From Center: New Political Imaginaries at the table: Interview with Kyle Bellucci Johanson
- Bad at Sports, Episode 671: table projects with Gregory Bae and Kyle Bellucci Johanson
- Art Institute Chicago: Perspectives: Tagging Along with a TEAM of Kids
- Imaginaries of the Future Symposium at CSUN and the MAIN Museum
- e-flux Education: Quantum Unlearning
- Hyperallergic: Inventive Responses to Labor and Immigration Issues at Human Resources
- Temporary Art Review: Making Plans at Human Resources
- Minneapolis Star Tribune: Bits and pieces of the zeitgeist in a new SooVAC show
- Minneaplis Public Radio News: Art Hounds: David Rathman, Steffani Jemison, and a glimpse into a schizophrenic mind
PUBLICATIONS
- No Necessary Correspondence exhibition catalog
- Portable Gray, Vol 4, No. 1, Spring 2021: Another Idea exhibition catalog
- Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft: Juniorprofessur und dann noch Habilitation: sinnvoll oder absurd?
- Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft: Formatwechsel. Zur Methodendebatte
- Writing for Sweaty Scales by Liang Luscombe
- Making Plans exhibition catalog essay
Courtesy of author.
Whoa de Whoa: The Gray Center’s “Another Idea” Comes To A Close
By Jad DahshanIn Practice: The UChicago Arts Blog
August 26, 2020
Excerpt
“I'm a potter in the morning, a painter in the noon, I’m a bureaucrat in the night time, and I am a lover when the moon is bright, whoa de whoa de whoa.”
On July 31, interdisciplinary sculptor and DoVA Professor Theaster Gates delivered a performance that marked the conclusion of the Gray Center’s online exhibition, Another Idea, as well as their Gray Sound Sessions series. Titled Whoa de Whoa, the hour-long program was broadcast on YouTube and paired organist Chris Foreman with a vehement vocal performance by Gates, who molded clay, drummed, and smoked as he sang.
Whoa de Whoa came at the end of an exhibition that interrogated questions relating to conceptual art, sociality, tactility, social media, capitalism, racial inequities in the art world, homelessness, and many others. Like some other performances in the show, Gates’ took on several of these concerns. His meditation on the difference between the ways Black and white people are prosecuted for marijuana possession, for one, echoes Chelsea A. Flowers’ performance, Chelsea’s Trivia Night. During the monologue at the very end of his performance, he occupies a similar speculative space which fellow exhibition artists Cauleen Smith (COVID Manifesto) and Kyle Bellucci Johanson (chance encounters for a third try: attempting a house party on the moon) also sought to create in their work: Gates imagines aloud an art historical training program for the frontline security staff at museums, who do not enjoy the same privileges as curators. Led by a Black woman, they would be called “securators!”
Read more here.