Chicago's Smart Museum Hosts An Exhibit By One Of Today's Most Influential Artists (Here's How To Visit)

Theaster Gates has spent the better part of two decades saying yes to things most people would haul to the curb. Old glass slides gathering dust in a university storage room? He'll take them. Wooden pews no longer needed in a chapel? Those too. Paint-splattered concrete from studio floors, discarded vitrines, granite pieces left over from an art center refurbishment — Gates became the person colleagues called when they needed to clear space, back when he was still working an administrative job at the University of Chicago and buying up derelict South Side buildings to fill with rescued objects.

That instinct has since grown into something else entirely. Now, Gates is a professor and a Guggenheim Fellow, and his work has traveled to the National Gallery of Art, the Serpentine Gallery, and Palais de Tokyo. His installations examine Black American culture through materials that carry weight beyond their physical forms. And now, for the first time, his hometown gets to see what happens when 20 years of collecting, preserving, and reimagining culminates in a single exhibition.

"Unto Thee" opened at the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art — one of the best free places to visit in Chicago — in late September, and it's as much a survey of Gates' relationship with the University of Chicago as it is a showcase of his artistic evolution. The show pulls together paintings, ceramics, films, and site-specific installations as well as lots of African statues, masks, and sculptures. Gates is reflecting on what it means to surrender all that effort, to give away what you've been holding. Chicago finally gets to see what its son has been building all along.

The exhibition lives at the Smart Museum of Art in Hyde Park — the University of Chicago's stretch of the South Side and one of the city's most vibrant neighborhoods. Chicago ranks among America's most walkable cities, and Hyde Park makes a strong case for why — the neighborhood has its own rhythm, and it's one that Theaster Gates has been moving to since long before this exhibition came together.

What's on view spans the breadth of Gates' practice, from large-scale ceramics he learned to throw during a 2004 stint in Tokoname, Japan, to installations built from the university's own discarded materials. There are vitrines from what used to be called the Oriental Institute — now the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures — and that collection of 72,000 glass lantern slides from the art history departments. You can also browse 350 African masks while listening to a late French-Vietnamese DJ's vinyl collection emanating from custom-built speaker cabinets.

Gates' time in Japan proves influential as the animistic philosophy of believing in the "spirit within things" — a key tenet of Shintoism that hovers over "Unto Thee." The show, which will be at the museum through February 2026, also runs alongside a site-specific installation in the museum's Threshold Lobby Series through July 2026. You have plenty of time to catch it, sit with what Gates has been holding onto, and understand why he couldn't just let it all go to the landfill. The museum is free to enter and open to the public Tuesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. The exhibition is sponsored by Northern Trust and the Terra Foundation for American Art.