Theaster Gates in "Chicago" - Season 8 | Art21

Theaster Gates: One note. No harmonies. No harmonies yet. [singers vocalizing] One, one, one... One, one, one, one One, one... One, one, one... I think I've been given the ability to see things. I can see not just the thing in front of me but the potential inside the thing. [vocalizing continues] The world is ripe for a making, for a remaking,

for a reshaping. Art has the ability to help us imagine that the world that we live in is really just today's condition. [Host] Welcome, uh, to the Stony Island Arts Bank. We are so thrilled, uh, to be opening our doors for the first time. [applause] Um, the vision of the project was conceived by our founder,

artist Theaster Gates. When he learned that the building initially was, uh, slated for demolition, it is out of his life as an artist living in this community that the Stony Island Arts Bank was born. Uh, ladies and gentlemen, Theaster Gates. [pottery wheel spinning]

[Theaster Gates] I came to art in a pretty non-conventional way. I have a degree in urban planning and some background in religious studies. And I ended up in the ceramics studio. I think one of the reasons that I really like clay so much is because it's the thing that, like, no one thinks about. It's, like, always under your feet.

I love that clay is always asking, "I can only be as beautiful as you can think me to be and work me to be," you know. And that's just super cool.

I grew up in Chicago. Uh, the neighborhood I grew up in is called East Garfield Park. We call it the west side. It was a rough, rough neighborhood. [Singer] Walk with me, Lord Walk with me... [Theaster Gates] I had had this anxiety all my life that my neighborhood was being torn down-- systematically, it felt--