The CHICAGO SCHOOL

HOW the CITY'S reigning cadre of ARTISTS, GALLERISTS, CURATORS, and COMMUNITY BUILDERS has sidestepped ART-WORLD clichés and created a STYLE all its OWN

- STEPHEN MOOALLEM

THEASTER GATES

Gates, who has degrees in art, ceramics, religion, and urban planning, has helped transform the South Side through his work with his Rebuild Foundation.

"The CONTRIBUTIONS of GWENDOLYN BROOKS, MARGARET TAYLOR BURROUGHS, and LORRAINE HANSBERRY can't be overstated.... They INVESTED deeply in the COMMUNITIES that they were a part of."

Theaster Gates has been thinking about monuments. "Young Lords and Their Traces," his new survey at New York's New Museum, is all about the way objects carry memories. It's a familiar theme in Gates's work, which often highlights the labor, craft, and life in reclaimed materials, like discarded floorboards or decommissioned fire hoses. The recent losses of some people who were important to him in different ways-like his former organ teacher and friend Alvin's mother, Christine Carter, and University of Chicago film scholar Robert Bird-were weighing on him. So he decided to turn the entire show-a collection of sculptures, ceramics, paintings, repurposed items, and mixed-media works-into a memorial. "I used to think that monuments were about statues of old guys," Gates says. "When I was doing my master's thesis, I wrote about a synagogue on the West Side of Chicago that had been transformed into a Baptist church, a flea market, and a synagogue again over 80 years. The synagogue is a monument. It is a testament to the truth of many accumulated lives." 

CANDIDA ALVAREZ

Alvarez's paintings draw on history, memory, and her own Puerto Rican heritage. Her work is a part of two new exhibitions, "Forecast Form" at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and "no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria" at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art.