Garden Stories: Black Vessel for a Saint

“In the moment that we align our bodies with these sculptures there becomes a communion of embodied experiences—across time and mediums and histories and people.” The Minneapolis Sculpture Garden's newest commission, Shadows at the Crossroads—by Ta-coumba Aiken and Seitu Jones with poet Soyini Guyton—uses shadows to tell the stories of important Minnesotans, from artist Siah Armajani to Harriet Robinson Scott, a slave who petitioned for her freedom at Fort Snelling. 

"I am writing in and through my body, a sweet, Black, female one, parallel, and tangentially to Theaster Gates: Assembly Hall." Tia-Simone Gardner reflects on her research in archives.

Getting rid of our old stuff is easy. Holding onto it is harder. In Theaster Gates: Assembly Hall, the artist presents selections of three of his collections to call attention to the objects that exist in the material world around us, just outside of our perception. Curatorial Fellow William Hernández Luege takes a close look at one of these collections and traces its history and impact from the 19th century through the present, showing just how powerful objects and ideas can be once they are forgotten—and what it might mean to suddenly remember them.

"This exhibition is not about what I made as much as how Americana or the Black Power movement or the white imagination swirl around in my head. Sometimes they produce conversations and new objects. Other times they just need to be held in tension with each other." Artist Theaster Gates joins Hamza Walker, director of LAXART, for a lively discussion about Gates’s practice, the new exhibition Theaster Gates: Assembly Hall, and the artist’s work with archives and collections.

“How do we deal with abandonment, ruin, decay? How do we start to imagine ourselves as deeper caretakers of the things that exist in the world?” In his art, Theaster Gates reuses, reinterprets, and reimagines objects that have been abandoned, neglected, or forgotten to call attention to the potential that exists in the material world around us. Exhibition curator Victoria Sung introduces the collections that anchor the four rooms of Theaster Gates: Assembly Hall: a university's archive of art historical glass slides, a selection of material from the publishing company behind Jet and Ebony magazines, a collection of racist memorabilia, and a facsimile of Gates's own clay studio.