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| Theaster Gates, 12 Ballads for the Huguenot House, 2012, Performance view, Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany Image courtesy of Kavi Gupta CHICAGO | BERLIN via mcachicago.org. |
Theaster Gates: 13th Ballad
May 18 – October 6,
2013
Artist Talk: Theaster Gates with David Levin and Hamza Walker
Saturday, May 18,
2013, 6pm
220 East Chicago
Avenue
Chicago, IL
13th Ballad, an installation by Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates, is an extension of the artist’s 12 Ballads
for Huguenot House, which was co-produced by the Museum of Contemporary
Art (MCA) Chicago for dOCUMENTA (13), the international art exhibition in
Kassel, Germany. 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, along with a
monumental double cross sculpture and carved wooden pews which create an
ecclesiastical ambience to suggest that art museums, like churches, are sites
of pilgrimage and thoughtful contemplation. 13th
Ballad is accompanied at the MCA by a series of collaborative performances
and is on view from May 18 to October 6, 2013. The exhibition is co- organized
by Michael Darling, MCA James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator, and Kristin Korolowicz,
Marjorie Susman Curatorial Fellow.
Theaster Gates’
practice includes performance, sculpture, installation, and large-scale urban
interventions. He created 12 Ballads for
Huguenot House as part of his ongoing efforts toward architectural and
social rejuvenation in his South Chicago neighborhood, such as his
refurbishment of an abandoned store into a studio and house for himself on
Dorchester Avenue. This effort was expanded to an abandoned house nearby, which
the artist and a team of laborers from the neighborhood prepared for renovation
and rebirth as a cultural center, and used the repurposed materials to make
both functional objects and purely aesthetic creations.
For 12 Ballads, Gates used those items and
materials 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’ collaborators, the Black Monks of Mississippi, recorded a series of
songs and performances in the South Side home, footage of which was screened in
Kassel and accompanied by another set of performances. The MCA Screen gallery
reprises these key aspects of 12 Ballads
for Huguenot House. Functional objects Gates and his team created for
dOCUMENTA (13) are showcased along with preparatory drawings and other
ephemera.
For the atrium
installation, Gates repurposed a set of pews from Bond Chapel, the University
of Chicago’s campus church. The pews were 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 16th and
18th centuries.
PERFORMANCES
13th Ballad is accompanied by a series of three
collaborative performances entitled The
Accumulative Affects of Migration 1-3, with Yaw Agyeman, Khari Lemuel,
Tomeka Reid, Joshua Abrams, Mikel Avery, Orron Kenyatta and friends from the
Chicago classical music community. University of Chicago scholar David Levin,
musician and composer Michael Drayton, and Theaster Gates create a new body of
music based on the work of 19th-century composer, Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots and Delta blues musician
Muddy Waters.
Schedule of
Performances
• Public Performance 1: Muddied
Pentatonic with Believers and Blocks
Sunday, June 30,
3:30 pm
• Public Performance 2: Migration
Stories
Sunday, August 11,
3:30 pm
• Public Performance 3: Church in Five
Acts
Sunday, September
22, 3:30 pm
EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
In 12 Ballads for Huguenot House, Theaster
Gates chronicles his ambitious project to unite two unused buildings -- one in
Chicago and one in Kassel, Germany -- by using parts of each to rebuild the
other. Kassel's forgotten and dilapidated Huguenot House, built during the
early 19th century, attracted the attention of Gates, who found parallels in
the history of the migrant workers who built it so many years ago with that of
black and Hispanic builders in his own neighborhood in Chicago today.
Discovering a large decaying building in Chicago, whose architectural details
remained intact, Gates envisioned an exchange and ultimately proposed to bring
materials from the Chicago building to renovate the Huguenot House. In the
pages of this book, Gates documents his plans for the exchange, as well as the
elaborate and complex sociopolitical and historical details, in twelve thematic
"ballads." The publication features forewords by Carolyn
Christov-Bakargiev and Madeleine Grynsztejn, essays by Michael Darling and
Matthew Jesse Jackson, and an interview with Gates by Christov-Barkargiev, in
addition to illustrated working notes by the artist. Published by dOCUMENTA (13)
and the MCA Chicago.
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