Chicago’s Opportunity Artist: Theaster Gates

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Ben Austen

Artist Theaster Gates sits with his large-scale installation, 13th Ballad, at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art

ILLINOIS---Six blocks from where I grew up, on Chicago’s South Side, the artist Theaster Gates showed me a neo-Classical ruin, a Prohibition-era bank shuttered for 33 years that I only ever registered vaguely as a part of the area’s enduring blight. “That’s my bank,” he announced with a flourish, pointing proudly to its glazed terra cotta and its ornamental eaves. When the bank was days from demolition, Gates spoke with Mayor Rahm Emanuel, whose brother, Ari, owns several Gates pieces; the city agreed to sell the abandoned building to Gates for $1, with the stipulation that he come up with the $3.7 million necessary for its renovation. A portion of that money, Gates devised, would be made from the bank’s original marble, which he cut into individual “bond certificates” engraved with an image of the building, his signature and the words “In ART We Trust.” He created 100 tablet-size bonds, selling them for $5,000 apiece; larger slabs, as weighty as tombstones, went for $50,000. Because they’re works of art, Gates told me, the marble will actually increase in value, functioning like real bonds. [link]