Now celebrating its 15th year of exhibiting experimental contemporary art, Locust Projects is pleased to present Soul Manufacturing Corporationby Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates, whose critically acclaimed installation 12 Ballads for Huguenot House was recently featured in dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel, Germany.

For the first gallery exhibition of this multi-disciplinary project, Gates will create a factory consisting of four pavilions, occupied by “skilled makers” who will work in Locust Projects’ main gallery. Beginning with an empty space, the "skilled makers" will produce “things” through the duration of the exhibition. Concurrently, Soul Manufacturing Corporation will host programs by a yoga instructor, a DJ, and a reader, all there to care for the makers and the audience. Inspiration for this programming stems from the lectors who presented news, politics, and literature to illiterate workers in the early industrial era. Soul Manufacturing Corporation is in its second year of exploring and creating relationships between aesthetics, labor and race. 

Gates is known for his performances, installations, and urban interventions, which transform spaces, institutions, traditions, and perceptions. His training as an urban planner and sculptor, and subsequent time spent studying clay, has given him keen awareness of the poetics of production and systems of organizing. Playing with these poetic and systematic interests, Gates has assembled gospel choirs, formed temporary unions, and used systems of mass production as a way of underscoring the need that industry has for the body. When Gates is not making art for museums, he is converting abandoned buildings into cultural spaces that allow not only new cultural moments to happen in unexpected places, but raise the expectations of where “place-making” happens and why. The exhibition will also include sculptural and two-dimensional works, created with materials sourced from sites in Chicago and Miami, underscoring Gates' interest in the poetics of re-purposed and salvaged materials. 

About the artist
Theaster Gates was born in 1973. He lives and works in Chicago. He has had solo exhibitions at Seattle Art Museum (2011), Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (2011), Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago (2011), Milwaukee Art Museum (2010) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2009). His work has been shown in group exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2010) and the Tokoname Museum of Ceramic History, Japan (2005). He also featured in ‘dOCUMENTA 13’, Kassel, Germany (2012), the ‘Armory Show’, New York (2011) and ‘Whitney Biennial’, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2010). One of his most esteemed projects is ‘Dorchester Projects’ (2006), which is ongoing. For his exhibition My Labor is My Protest (2012), Gates honored his father’s work as a roofer as an alternative form of protest during the American Civil Rights Era by transforming one gallery into a library of race-related literature with over 10,000 books, open to the public at White Cube Gallery in London. 

Soul Manufacturing Corporation is a multi-city initiative based in Chicago that works in tandem with the Rebuild Foundation, an urban redevelopment organization dedicated to the creative re-use of buildings and design education throughout communities of color.

Locust Projects’ exhibitions and programming are made possible with the support from: The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; Cowles Charitable Trust; Foundation for Contemporary Arts; Galt & Skye Mikesell; Hannibal Cox Jr. Foundation; John S. and James L. Knight Foundation; Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, the Cultural Affairs Council, the Mayor, and the Miami-Dade County Board of County Commissioners; Miami Sports and Exhibition Authority. This exhibition was made possible with support from: Kavi Gupta CHICAGO| BERLIN, White Cube, London and Northern Trust. Special thanks to Sari & Arthur Agatston, Barbara & Bruce Berger, Francie Bishop Good & David Horovitz, Barbara Bluhm-Kaul & Don Kaul, Nancy & Robert Magoon, Susan Bell Richard & Dennis Richard, June & Paul Schorr III, Debra & Dennis Scholl, Mary & David Solomon.