Theaster Gates Quotes

It's not really about the material. It's about our capacity to shape things.

I think I'm a full-time artist, a full-time urban planner, and a full-time preacher with an aspiration of no longer needing any of those titles. Rather, I'm trying to do what for some seems a very messy work or a complicated work.

I'm not a preacher, but I preach. I'm not a Buddhist, but I chant. I'm not race theorist, but I have questions and ponderances around the complexities of race and class and culture wherever I am.

Sometimes the creating that we do is creating a platform that allows other creative people to pitch in.

I believe that beauty is a basic service.

I think I'm passionately allowing myself to be influenced by the things that are around me.

The reason artists want to have works in museums is that we want our works to be seen by as many people as possible and we want our ideas to be understood in more complicated ways.

I have the willingness to think fully about where opportunities are and where they live.

Modernism was influenced by what they call a primativist ethic.

What I think museums do very well is that they say to a public, "We have some stuff that's worth looking at."

The fact that the work is affirmed by the Museum of Contemporary Art I think sends continued signals that this is worth paying attention to, looking at, and understanding.

It's really exciting to know that people want to use the house as a house and want to live there although it hasn't been a used, occupied space in 50 or 60 years.

All kinds of performance practices have a certain register of power or solemnity.