Past Residents
Past Resident2010: Artadia
Theaster Gates
If pressed to describe Theaster Gates’ work in one word, it would be ‘transformative.’ In his performances, installations and urban interventions, Gates—an artist, musician and ‘cultural planner’ as well as director of arts program development for the University of Chicago—transforms spaces, relationships, traditions and perceptions.
Exploring architecture as a tool for mediation and meditation, Gates draws from both urbanism and art to provide what he terms ‘moments of interstitial beauty’ in Chicago’s South Side neighborhoods. His most recent project, ‘Temple’, comprises two neighboring houses whose interiors he completely rebuilt of donated and repurposed materials to create spaces for workshops, exhibitions and other public events on topics of race, art and politics.
Gates’ work is funded by the Joyce Foundation, the Graham Foundation, and the African American Art Alliance. In 2010 alone, he has performed
and exhibited at the Whitney Biennial and the Armory Show in New York, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Brunno David Gallery and Pulitzer Museum of Art in St. Louis, and the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. He also completed residencies with the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wis., Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, Oregon, and Artadia New York. He is a Loeb Fellow at Harvard Graduate School of Design for 2010-11.
Residents from United States
Past Resident2010: Gallery Difference
Kyong Sim Jeong
Kyoung Sim Jeong was born in Korea in 1975. She has earned a B.A in Fine Arts at Seoul National University and a M.F.A in Fine Arts at Seoul National University. Her work revolves around fundamental questions of eating. Jeong was born in the seventies, a period in which Korea experienced rapid economic growth. Industrialization in Korea transformed a war torn country into a high-tech modern nation. “Modernization,” however, was synonymous with “westernization” in Korea. The seduction of material prosperity has resulted in a widespread belief that everything can be bought or sold for money. Necessity gave birth to avarice. This experience made Jeong understand instinctively that life is endlessly precarious and unstable without having to resort to concepts such as “survival of the fittest” and natural selection.