"The hardware store is the atlas. Like so many encyclopedic forms, it reminds us of a singular vocabulary, a homeland, a material sanctuary that unfortunately has its end when the form of exchange is no longer convenient."

-Theaster Gates

GRAY is pleased to present Theaster Gates: How to Sell Hardware.

How to Sell Hardware tells the story of Theaster Gates’s ongoing engagement with a family-owned True Value hardware store formerly located on Chicago’s South Side. Once a lively central space for local commerce, the True Value store shared in the growth and prosperity of a thriving community during the 1970s and 80s before similarly mirroring the neighborhood’s downturns as business slowed in the 1990s.
 

Gates, whose practice is deeply invested in the material preservation of neglected social and cultural histories, acquired the store and all of its merchandise in 2014 and has continued to engage with it ever since.  Just as the artist has reactivated other visual archives—including those of the magazines Jet and Ebony, acquired from the Johnson Publishing Company, and the glass lantern slide collection from the University of Chicago’s Department of Art History—Gates immerses himself in the tangible history of the hardware store. Through Gates’s material and conceptual interpositions, How to Sell Hardware memorializes the history of a changing urban landscape.
 

On entering the exhibition, two works, History of Conveyance and Foot Scrubber, provide a physical and conceptual frame for the exhibition. In History of Conveyance, a retracted accordion conveyor sits dormant within a large antiquities vitrine and alongside a 1912 edition of Roy F. Soule's book How to Sell Hardware.

"This exhibition examines my instigation and insistence that the world is not separated between high objects and low objects, but rather, that the artist has the capacity to determine the designation of each."

-Theaster Gates

Situated across the exhibition space from History of Conveyance and made up of twelve aligned rotary abrasives sourced from the hardware archive, Foot Scrubber provides a prelude to Gates’s immersive installation. In this work, Gates introduces viewers to the notion of the artist’s capacity to convert unexpected and practical everyday materials into art objects.

Foot Scrubber finds dialogue with the pioneering forms and materials of Donald Judd, especially echoing Judd’s characteristic structured and balanced rhythm through the repetition of materials, color, and texture and the interplay between positive and negative space. Gates not only imbues these industrial materials with aesthetic merit and value, but also acknowledges and elevates the care, labor, and thoughtfulness that went into the design, production, and uses of such ordinary objects.

 

“What can the hardware store teach me about being myself? About being a whole human and a lover of things, because there are a lot of things to love. How might the hardware store want to continue its life, not as a kind of monument to hardware stores, but the monumentality would be in its ability to continue to hold up the world.”

- Theaster Gates

Amassing and repurposing what physical inventory remained from the store, Gates invites viewers to look both at and beyond the hardware objects. In his installation titled Retaining Wall, Gates encases volumes of densely packed material within stacked metal containers to form a monumental wall that bisects the gallery.

Gates’s weighty memorial nods to the history of modern architecture while exposing the aesthetic potential of utilitarian items to be fundamentally didactic, carrying with them the legacy of the everyday worker and shopkeeper even after the objects themselves become obsolete. The artist modeled the encasement after landscaping gabions, retention devices which are placed on land as it shifts to help with erosion. For the artist, Retaining Wall is not a tomb but a monument to art-objects in flux, on dynamic terrain, as they slip between registers of utility and aesthetics. With multiple functioning light bulbs within the steel enclosure, the life of the objects begins anew.

Beyond Retaining Wall, Gates installs Hardware Store Painting, a towering metal pegboard wall on which hangs a suite of paintings created from the repositioned store merchandise.

The paintings eschew the familiar taxonomy of hardware items hanging by scale and use, instead arranged by color and gradient to form compositions that evoke the color and shaped canvases of hard-edge abstractionists like Ellsworth Kelly and Leon Polk Smith. In their new arrangements, the paintings maintain a topographical feel of depth, insisting on their physical dimensions and presence as much as their art historical lineage.

"I continue to grapple with the questions of economy within Black space and the apologetic prerequisite that very few care enough about Black space to try to save it. While my attempts are at best, often laughable, I nonetheless grapple, in Black space with my truth and its truth. A muscle worked is better than a lazy muscle. How to Sell Hardware works my muscle and offers me ways into new material and spatial configurations.” 

- Theaster Gates

Theaster Gates: How to Sell Hardware is on view from May 28 through July 31, 2021. Click here to plan your visit.