THEASTER GATES, MALAGA VITRINE #1, 2019

The work of Theaster Gates is deeply engaged in material and cultural production, preservation, and presentation, especially as they relate to historical and contemporary power dynamics. The present work, Malaga Vitrine #1, makes these concerns explicit by placing otherwise unrelated objects of ambiguous origin together in a wall-mounted vitrine. With this arrangement of found and studio-made objects, placed behind glass, Gates assembles a loose narrative intended to provoke questions of cultural representation and knowledge production, particularly within museological displays. 

Malaga Vitrine #1 was an integral work in Gates’s 2019-2020 exhibition, Amalgam, which debuted at the Palais de Tokyo and later traveled to TATE Liverpool. This exhibition explored the social histories of migration and interracial relations during a specific episode in American history – the little-known story of Malaga Island off the coast of Maine. The island was home to a small community of Black, white, and mixed-race people from the end of the Civil War until 1912, when they were evicted from their homes by the state's governor. The exhibition’s title Amalgam, a near anagram to Malaga, has also been used in the past to denote racial, ethnic, and religious mingling. For Gates, the term has acquired an even more charged significance, impelling his practice toward new formal and conceptual explorations in film, sculpture, architecture, and music. 

LEON POLK SMITH, TRILOGY IN YELLOW, RED, BLUE, 1969

American painter Leon Polk Smith was heralded for his lifelong commitment to simplified shapes, brilliant colors, and minimal, pressurized compositions—a commitment that predated, influenced, and outlasted hard-edge painting and Minimalism. Influenced by Mondrian and Brancusi, Smith was also extremely independent and original, pulling in visual inspiration directly from life, whether it was the open expanses of the Southwest, where he spent his childhood on Indian territory, or flat drawings of dimensional baseballs and soccer balls he found in sports magazines. Smith’s 1950s Correspondence series sought to involve and interchange positive and negative space, drawing a taut vitality between two vibrantly painted shapes defined by a precise but irregular contour. In the late 1960s and 1970s, his revolutionary Constellations went even further, introducing multiple, shaped panels into a single composition.