Theaster Gates quotes:

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  • 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.

  • My first experience with the creative was mopping tar. If you let the tar sit, it can get cold pretty quickly. And because the mops are so heavy, you've got to dip it and then ride it really fast.

  • There were a series of moments when I decided that art was important, and it was an important vehicle for me to express my interest in spaces.

  • I actually no longer use 'art' as the framing device. I think I'm just kind of practicing things, practicing life, practicing creation.

  • If we imagine that the only right that we have is to make commodifiable objects, then we limit our practice, and we limit the great potential for an understanding between collectors, curators and galleries.

  • Everything is raw material to me. Land is raw material... I take one form and transform it into other forms.

  • 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.

  • Modernism was influenced by what they call a primativist ethic.

  • 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.

  • The reality in the neighborhood that I live in is: if I don't constantly reconcile what I have against what other people don't, either I need to leave and be around other people who have what I have, or I'm constantly engaged in this kind of dynamic flow of opportunity and sharing.

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

  • I believe that beauty is a basic service.

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

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

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

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

  • 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.

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

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