Collecting and Archiving  

Collecting and archiving can prevent the loss of history, yet underlying hierarchies and biases are also inherent to the process. Gates notes, 'If you own and maintain your own archive, you can determine what's important…'.¹ He began collecting early in his life. Captivated by second-hand stores in high school, he acquired men's ties, which he would carefully organise by colour and pattern. His artistic vision is spawned from creating order from chaos by collecting and archiving. He transforms what is left behind or hidden, bringing it back to life through the process of creation. His first significant collection consisted of glass lantern slides acquired from the University of Chicago—60,000 images used in teaching art history from a predominantly Eurocentric perspective. These slides motivated him because they revealed the prevailing whiteness of art historiography and the absence of artists and figures of colour who are now a part of the Stony Island Arts Bank collection.

Over the years, Gates has built an extensive collection of over 100,000 books, magazines and pottery, much of which he inherited from significant figures. This includes items from Jesse Owens, the renowned African American Olympic athlete, and Marva Lee Pitchford-Jolly, a potter and early queer feminist of African-American descent. He received the complete collections of Ebony and Jet magazines from the Johnson Publishing Company, which chronicle aspects of Black American history. These collections are housed in various locations, including his studio, home, and the Stony Island Arts Bank and act as evidence of Black heritage and stories. He aims to reveal and reshape the dominant colonial version of history by collecting and reclaiming objects of Black history. For instance, for his exhibition Black Archive at Kunsthaus Bregenz in 2016, he exhibited objects from his collection that reflect stereotypes and racial caricatures called 'negrobilia'. In displaying these objects, not dissimilar to the way artists such as Australian Tony Albert employ kitsch ‘Aboriginalia’, Gates confronts audiences with the racial injustice of historical representations of marginalised people.

Ceramics as a Medium of Connection  

Ceramics are at the heart of Gates's art. The medium is universal, and the everyday, ubiquitous, and even democratic nature of clay epitomises what Gates seeks in his work. Throughout history and across cultures, potters have been storytellers, using clay to express rituals and social connections and to make vessels for function and purpose. Gates's recent exhibition, Afro-Mingei (2024), at the Mori Art Museum expands dramatically on a 2019 project exhibited at White Cube under the same title. Gates exhibition draws together his itinerate interests in ceramics and archives to draw out the cultural hybridity implicit in the exhibition’s title. For the exhibition, he connects distinct democratic and celebratory cultural movements: the ceramic tradition of the Japanese Mingei with the 'Black is Beautiful' movement of the 60s, 70s, and 80s.

The Mingei movement, characterised by unnamed folk pottery, was led by the philosopher and critic Yanagi Sōetsu in the 1920s and translates to ‘arts of the people’. Gate’s layers the histories and narratives of Mingei with the aesthetics of Afro pride including a ‘Black Library’ and Hammond B-3 organ (A Heavenly Chord, 2022). The exhibition is divided into sections—Shrine, Black Library & Black Space, Blackness, Timelines, and Afro-Mingei—showcasing new and existing works demonstrating the temporal intersections of both movements. He describes the exhibition as a 'testament to what happens when a person yields themselves to the possibilities of cultural influence through making and friendship.'² The exhibition includes works by artists he admires, such as the nineteenth-century potter David Drake, who inscribed poetry on his pots as an act of rebellion. These generous tributes are acts of historical inclusion, which also position the object or the ceramic as a carrier of narrative, memory, and resilience.

Gates's ceramic sculptures reveal his fundamental belief in creation, the process of making, and shared experience. They epitomise the cultural hybridity of the Afro-Mingei concept. In other words, his practice demonstrates the relationship between materials, people and the world. In an earlier work, Plate Convergence (2007), he hosted a communal dinner for a hundred guests by serving soul food on plates he crafted in homage to Japanese pottery. The object and the food became a medium for connection, and the meal was transformed into a communal ritual through sharing. As he says, 'I feel like, as a potter, you also start to learn how to shape the world'.⁴ Shaping clay with his hands, creating pottery, and making things go hand in hand with his thinking. Making and materials are art, community and social engagement. His sculptures become the conduit for dialogue, empathy and cultural understanding.

A Living Legacy  

Gates's artistic practice integrates collecting, archiving and making as social practice, culminating in a type of self-portraiture. He explains, '…In the end, what I have is a portrait of my interests and who I am. I like that. Collecting as a kind of portraiture.'⁵ Each object is redolent with meaning:  'These physical objects create new, unexpected synaptic connections. And by being surrounded with beautiful things that also hold knowledge and memory, I maintain an investment in a wider position of the world.'

Gates' work is a reminder of the physical power of art to hold tangible space for memories, places, ideas and things. Abandoned buildings become reservoirs of ideas, artefacts, sites of performance and community activity; collections of books reclaim histories and become libraries for everyday use and learning; pots become collections of the world, representing different cultures, friendships and experiences. Music and song become vehicles of sensory and spiritual transformation. His democratic approach is universal. His work asks us to rethink our relationship with history, to what we know and may have read, and to otherwise celebrate the collective, the community of the present and the possible future. He challenges the dominant narratives and, in so doing, amplifies the voices and experiences of the underheard, of the African American histories and people that inspire him. His work shows the power of art to foster community and the importance of archives to preserve and celebrate the collective legacies that make up the histories of humankind.