The Community Builder: In Conversation with Theaster Gates
Setup
Any city would be lucky to have an artist in its corner like 2016 Harman-Eisner Artist-in-Residence Theaster Gates, whose work embraces activism, cultural preservation, and community development. Since he began work on his now famed Dorchester Projects in 2009, Gates’s transformation of a once-neglected South Side neighborhood into a thriving cultural hub has yielded an enclave of buildings that offer an array of cultural programming, from gardening to youth art classes to Black Cinema. Last fall he added to that impressive collection the Stony Island Arts Bank. Located in an abandoned savings & loan building, it is home to treasures of Chicago culture and history in an archive and performance space unlike any other in the world. At this inflection point in his career, Gates will speak with Thelma Golden, director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, about where he takes Chicago next and how he is expanding his vision around the globe.
Explore More
USA

Whether expressed through systems that are easy to navigate, devices that are friendly to their users, and spaces that are pleasing to the eye, thoughtful design can break dow...


Most Americans today would agree that the dream of supporting a family and living a good life on one full time salary is not available to vast numbers of people. Wages have no...


Shakespeare is ubiquitous in literature classes and theater, but the avenues of relating to his work are not always clear to young people and modern audiences. Some, such as S...

October is National Book Month, and we’re celebrating by looking back at some of our favorite conversations about reading and writing from the Aspen Ideas Festival and Aspen I...


Climate change catastrophes are already happening with increasing regularity, and it’s clear we need to take action. The Biden administration has set a target of zero carbon e...


Even when the economy is booming and unemployment is low, millions of Americans still face economic hardship. And in the last few years the United States has dealt with supply...


Almost everyone agrees that immigration policy in the United States is lacking, but despite decades of debate, Congress has not been able to pass comprehensive reform on the i...

Americans seem more culturally and ideologically divided than at any point in most of our lifetimes, with no prospect of bridging those divides any time soon. The only thing w...

It’s a fact: In communities where voting rates are higher, health outcomes are better. That’s why ER physician Alister Martin, the Founder of Vot-ER and CEO of A Healthier Dem...


Populations around the world have been electing more and more autocratic leaders in the past couple decades, via supposedly free, fair, and democratic elections. The freedom o...


Merely defining gun violence is difficult, and coming to agreement on what to do about it often seems near-impossible in the United States. But people on all sides of the deba...


The U.S. Supreme Court continues to issue major decisions that have profound impacts on the lives of Americans and the political future of the country. During the term that ju...

At the 2023 Aspen Ideas Festival, we dug into some of the most important and fascinating issues of our time, from rebuilding trust in our institutions and the promise and peri...

If one dives deeply into the statistics, the American Dream is actually quite alive and well. In his provocative book, The Myth of American Inequality, former U.S. senator Phi...

How do we describe the Republican Party today, and what are the dynamics that will shape its future?

Like Photoshop, photography, or even pigment, A.I. represents new technology for creative expression that aims to close the gap between imagination and physicality. Alexander...

Join John Hamre, CEO of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, for a dynamic exploration of the transformational forces that will shape the global community throu...

Journalist Tom Friedman reflects on 28 years of reporting, and renowned architect David Adjaye shares how he approaches the design of physical spaces — and how those spaces ha...

In their new book, co-authors and Stanford professors Rob Reich and Mehran Sahami argue that big tech’s obsession with optimization and efficiency has sacrificed fundamental h...

With the dream of the Oslo Accords long in the rear-view mirror and no prospect of an agreement between Israelis and Palestinians ahead, is it time to give up on the two-state...