Reserved Objects: Theaster Gates at the Smart Museum | Arts & Entertainment

“Unto Thee,” Theaster Gates’ new exhibition at the Smart Museum of Art, is a slippery exploration of the archive’s sensorial history. 

The museum’s small, white lobby is overtaken by a profusion of artifacts that dwarf the space: The entire south wall swells with hundreds of African masks, instruments, and statues. The soft jazz suffusing the room does little to mitigate the display’s intimidating proportions. 

What unsettles most, however, is not the scale but the absence of wall text or tags explaining the objects’ provenance or use. In fact, such questions of context haunt all of Gates’ salvaged things. 

Gates, a native Chicagoan and professor of visual arts at the University of Chicago, has long been interested in the communal histories that objects refract as they pass through the stewardship of different people and places. Gates’ projects extend this investigation into the public sphere, from the Stony Island Arts Bank, a former community bank he converted into an exhibition space and Black cultural archive, to the Dorchester Projects, which transform vacant buildings into artistic and communal venues.

This tension carries into the gallery proper, where visitors are guided along a diagonal wall of bookshelves holding the personal library of the late U. of C. professor Robert Bird. Bird’s widow gifted the collection with the agreement that it remain actively used. Indeed, the books bear traces of past readers: a Target receipt is tucked into one volume, an unopened envelope in another. The shelves are textured with rust and scratches. Despite the “Do Not Touch” label, the urge to pick up a book — to touch it, and to see who had touched it before — is powerful. We’re refused the final layer of contact that would, we feel, consummate our relationship with this memory-laden object. 

Similar confrontations occur with the wall of scuffed wooden cabinets housing the 72,000 glass lantern slides Gates received from the U. of C.’s art history department. The cabinets invite exploration but deny access. Here as elsewhere in the show, we are held at a tantalizing distance from “total” understanding.

This distance is what gives “Unto Thee” the brazenness of its title. In the catalog, Gates describes his interest in the art object that isn’t “really preoccupied with itself” — a work that “could go back into the ground” in “the same way it was produced.” Here, the object is not a permanent embodiment of its origins but a temporary guest of the contexts on the way to some fundamental condition of oblivion. Accordingly, “Unto Thee” seems less concerned with letting the visitor “touch” the objects’ deep histories than with meditating on their recent transit, specifically through Gates’ stewardship. Bird’s library, for instance, was previously exhibited in New York in 2022, and the lantern slide cabinets passed through multiple of Gates’ public art archives before arriving at the Smart.

There is a palpable power in foregrounding the personal and aesthetic dimensions of the archive, in keeping viewers just outside the surface of its layered histories of use. It defies the familiar expectation for artists of color to enunciate the exhaustive historical context of their work, though underlying frictions remain. The conflict between those histories and museological expectations doesn’t disappear when given a personal slant. Instead, it brings the objects into new and volatile afterlives. 

“Theaster Gates: Unto Thee” is on view at the Smart Museum of Art, 5550 S. Greenwood Ave., through February 22, 2026.