Overview

A comprehensive overview of the work and creative practice of American artist Theaster Gates. A self-designated ""keeper of objects,"" Theaster Gates investigates the value of things and their potential to hold layered meanings in his work. He activates these objects in a manner that nurtures space for disinvested histories—often Black histories. Part of his practice is also to create physical spaces for others, including through residencies he has established in Chicago's South Side, such as through the Rebuild Foundation, Stony Island Arts Bank, and other projects. Taken together, Gates's work is driven by questions around institutional and systemic structures, the erasure of Black histories, and ongoing social disinvestment in Black lives in Chicago and the United States. Theaster Gates: Unto Thee is published in conjunction with the Smart Museum of Art's exhibition on the artist. Edited by Galina Mardilovich and Vanja Malloy, the accompanying catalog expands on Gates's artistic practice and features five essays by contributing scholars. Unto Thee marks the first major museum presentation of the Chicago artist in his hometown.

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9780226115702

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Reviews

A lavishly beautiful book, this work engenders a text that matches the seriousness and dignity of its presentation. A highly gifted writer, Copeland navigates the discourses of his field of study and the accumulated position-takings of contemporary cultural critique in its minoritarian rigor and emphases, as well as a general appeal to what Virginia Woolf once called the 'common reader, ' with uncommon idiomatic ease, with inimitable grace. The benefits that accrue to the reader as a result are immense. --Small Axe Copeland . . . [has] done remarkable work bringing the lens of 'post-slavery' to bear not only on the objects of . . . analysis, but on . . . readers' senses of identity and community, as well as our notions of historical legacy. --Oxford Art Journal Art history of the sort that Huey Copeland produces, in its capacity to make us see works of art anew, makes us see the world anew as well. Such vision is often discomfiting and, as such, unwanted precisely insofar as it refuses to allow any simple separation of beauty and ugliness, enjoyment and terror. But this is exactly what makes such vision necessary. This is all extraordinarily clear in the work Copeland has done in Bound to Appear, a brilliantly accomplished and vivid examination of the legacies of slavery that continue to haunt American art. --Fred Moten, Duke University With its rigorous and nuanced theoretical engagement as well as its meticulous description and analysis of artworks, Bound to Appear brings together the literature of black radical thought and modernist formalism not only to enhance our understanding of the complex range of issues and materials engaged by the artists under scrutiny but also to insist that their practices are central to the larger histories of modernism and contemporary art. Throughout, Huey Copeland's prose is simply stunning, punctuated with moving rhetorical flourishes and crescendos. This is an incredibly imaginative and compelling book. --Steven Nelson, University of California, Los Angeles The archival turn among Black Atlantic artists gets the depth of attention it has long deserved in Bound to Appear. Asking why the subject of slavery is so resistant to representation, Huey Copeland builds upon studies of race and visuality inaugurated by Ralph Ellison and Frantz Fanon, adding far-reaching insights into the politics of form in post-medium art. Introducing a bold voice whose eloquence delivers conceptual acuity with ethical urgency, this field-turning book will be eagerly embraced across the arts and humanities for the future horizons of intellectual adventure it opens up. --Kobena Mercer, Yale University Bound to Appear is bound to change forever the ways we think about blackness, historical memory, and contemporary art. In combining close-looking, theoretical sophistication, and writerly verve, Copeland makes us see the work and world of visual art differently. Students of contemporary art history and black cultural studies will welcome this book with appropriate admiration and wild abandon. --Richard Meyer, Stanford University Copeland's own elegantly composed and dynamically well-organized analysis fits comfortably with much of the text-laden works carried out by the artists themselves. --Art History Much like Paul Gilroy's seminal text BlackAtlantic, which precedes it by two decades, the project's greatest strength is its heterogeneity derived from working across previously unconnected spaces, especially the site-specific practices of these four artists. Copeland does not make a claim for mastery but instead plots the co-ordinates and opens up terrain for future mapping by readers and viewers of these 'spatial texts.' Copeland's phenomenological investigation is equal parts mind and spirit, capturing the geist of this heated era's complex politics with fresh clarity and boundless sensitivity. --Immediations Bound to Appear is not about the comforts of representation. . . . Instead, it leads us to the limits of representational discourse, to something deeper and more opaque. . . . Bound to Appear adjusts our vision, tunes our listening practices, and recalibrates our haptic sensibilities to see blackness everywhere, in all its pain and promises of resistance. --Art Journal Taken together, this book's theoretical and critical maneuvers are consistently dazzling. . . . Bound to Appear's combination of sensory description, sensitive handling of theory, and thorough research on featured artists and their milieu makes it a substantial and fresh piece of art history. --Nka [A] lavishly illustrated and ambitious book.... Highly recommended. --Choice

A lavishly beautiful book, this work engenders a text that matches the seriousness and dignity of its presentation. A highly gifted writer, Copeland navigates the discourses of his field of study and the accumulated position-takings of contemporary cultural critique in its minoritarian rigor and emphases, as well as a general appeal to what Virginia Woolf once called the 'common reader, ' with uncommon idiomatic ease, with inimitable grace. The benefits that accrue to the reader as a result are immense. -- Small Axe Copeland . . . [has] done remarkable work bringing the lens of 'post-slavery' to bear not only on the objects of . . . analysis, but on . . . readers' senses of identity and community, as well as our notions of historical legacy.-- Oxford Art Journal Bound to Appear is bound to change forever the ways we think about blackness, historical memory, and contemporary art. In combining close-looking, theoretical sophistication, and writerly verve, Copeland makes us see the work and world of visual art differently. Students of contemporary art history and black cultural studies will welcome this book with appropriate admiration and wild abandon. -- Richard Meyer, Stanford University Bound to Appear is not about the comforts of representation. . . . Instead, it leads us to the limits of representational discourse, to something deeper and more opaque. . . . Bound to Appear adjusts our vision, tunes our listening practices, and recalibrates our haptic sensibilities to see blackness everywhere, in all its pain and promises of resistance. -- Art Journal [A] lavishly illustrated and ambitious book.... Highly recommended. -- Choice Art history of the sort that Huey Copeland produces, in its capacity to make us see works of art anew, makes us see the world anew as well. Such vision is often discomfiting and, as such, unwanted precisely insofar as it refuses to allow any simple separation of beauty and ugliness, enjoyment and terror. But this is exactly what makes such vision necessary. This is all extraordinarily clear in the work Copeland has done in Bound to Appear, a brilliantly accomplished and vivid examination of the legacies of slavery that continue to haunt American art. -- Fred Moten, Duke University Copeland's own elegantly composed and dynamically well-organized analysis fits comfortably with much of the text-laden works carried out by the artists themselves. -- Art History Much like Paul Gilroy's seminal text BlackAtlantic, which precedes it by two decades, the project's greatest strength is its heterogeneity derived from working across previously unconnected spaces, especially the site-specific practices of these four artists. Copeland does not make a claim for mastery but instead plots the co-ordinates and opens up terrain for future mapping by readers and viewers of these 'spatial texts.' Copeland's phenomenological investigation is equal parts mind and spirit, capturing the geist of this heated era's complex politics with fresh clarity and boundless sensitivity. -- Immediations The archival turn among Black Atlantic artists gets the depth of attention it has long deserved in Bound to Appear. Asking why the subject of slavery is so resistant to representation, Huey Copeland builds upon studies of race and visuality inaugurated by Ralph Ellison and Frantz Fanon, adding far-reaching insights into the politics of form in post-medium art. Introducing a bold voice whose eloquence delivers conceptual acuity with ethical urgency, this field-turning book will be eagerly embraced across the arts and humanities for the future horizons of intellectual adventure it opens up. -- Kobena Mercer, Yale University With its rigorous and nuanced theoretical engagement as well as its meticulous description and analysis of artworks, Bound to Appear brings together the literature of black radical thought and modernist formalism not only to enhance our understanding of the complex range of issues and materials engaged by the artists under scrutiny but also to insist that their practices are central to the larger histories of modernism and contemporary art. Throughout, Huey Copeland's prose is simply stunning, punctuated with moving rhetorical flourishes and crescendos. This is an incredibly imaginative and compelling book. -- Steven Nelson, University of California, Los Angeles Taken together, this book's theoretical and critical maneuvers are consistently dazzling. . . . Bound to Appear's combination of sensory description, sensitive handling of theory, and thorough research on featured artists and their milieu makes it a substantial and fresh piece of art history. -- Nka

A lavishly beautiful book, this work engenders a text that matches the seriousness and dignity of its presentation. A highly gifted writer, Copeland navigates the discourses of his field of study and the accumulated position-takings of contemporary cultural critique in its minoritarian rigor and emphases, as well as a general appeal to what Virginia Woolf once called the 'common reader, ' with uncommon idiomatic ease, with inimitable grace. The benefits that accrue to the reader as a result are immense. --Small Axe Copeland . . . [has] done remarkable work bringing the lens of 'post-slavery' to bear not only on the objects of . . . analysis, but on . . . readers' senses of identity and community, as well as our notions of historical legacy. --Oxford Art Journal Bound to Appear is bound to change forever the ways we think about blackness, historical memory, and contemporary art. In combining close-looking, theoretical sophistication, and writerly verve, Copeland makes us see the work and world of visual art differently. Students of contemporary art history and black cultural studies will welcome this book with appropriate admiration and wild abandon. --Richard Meyer, Stanford University Bound to Appear is not about the comforts of representation. . . . Instead, it leads us to the limits of representational discourse, to something deeper and more opaque. . . . Bound to Appear adjusts our vision, tunes our listening practices, and recalibrates our haptic sensibilities to see blackness everywhere, in all its pain and promises of resistance. --Art Journal [A] lavishly illustrated and ambitious book.... Highly recommended. --Choice Art history of the sort that Huey Copeland produces, in its capacity to make us see works of art anew, makes us see the world anew as well. Such vision is often discomfiting and, as such, unwanted precisely insofar as it refuses to allow any simple separation of beauty and ugliness, enjoyment and terror. But this is exactly what makes such vision necessary. This is all extraordinarily clear in the work Copeland has done in Bound to Appear, a brilliantly accomplished and vivid examination of the legacies of slavery that continue to haunt American art. --Fred Moten, Duke University Copeland's own elegantly composed and dynamically well-organized analysis fits comfortably with much of the text-laden works carried out by the artists themselves. --Art History Much like Paul Gilroy's seminal text BlackAtlantic, which precedes it by two decades, the project's greatest strength is its heterogeneity derived from working across previously unconnected spaces, especially the site-specific practices of these four artists. Copeland does not make a claim for mastery but instead plots the co-ordinates and opens up terrain for future mapping by readers and viewers of these 'spatial texts.' Copeland's phenomenological investigation is equal parts mind and spirit, capturing the geist of this heated era's complex politics with fresh clarity and boundless sensitivity. --Immediations Taken together, this book's theoretical and critical maneuvers are consistently dazzling. . . . Bound to Appear's combination of sensory description, sensitive handling of theory, and thorough research on featured artists and their milieu makes it a substantial and fresh piece of art history. --Nka The archival turn among Black Atlantic artists gets the depth of attention it has long deserved in Bound to Appear. Asking why the subject of slavery is so resistant to representation, Huey Copeland builds upon studies of race and visuality inaugurated by Ralph Ellison and Frantz Fanon, adding far-reaching insights into the politics of form in post-medium art. Introducing a bold voice whose eloquence delivers conceptual acuity with ethical urgency, this field-turning book will be eagerly embraced across the arts and humanities for the future horizons of intellectual adventure it opens up. --Kobena Mercer, Yale University With its rigorous and nuanced theoretical engagement as well as its meticulous description and analysis of artworks, Bound to Appear brings together the literature of black radical thought and modernist formalism not only to enhance our understanding of the complex range of issues and materials engaged by the artists under scrutiny but also to insist that their practices are central to the larger histories of modernism and contemporary art. Throughout, Huey Copeland's prose is simply stunning, punctuated with moving rhetorical flourishes and crescendos. This is an incredibly imaginative and compelling book. --Steven Nelson, University of California, Los Angeles

Author Information

Huey Copeland is associate professor of art history at Northwestern University.

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