Gray is pleased to host the premiere of “How to Sell Hardware,” an experimental documentary by Theaster Gates. Made in conjunction with his solo exhibition at Gray Warehouse, the film will be introduced by curator and scholar, Romi Crawford.

Gates’s documentary chronicles his engagement with the former True Value hardware store whose materials and history are at the center of his exhibition. Once a lively central space for local commerce, the True Value store shared in the growth and prosperity of a thriving community on Chicago’s South Side during the 1970s and 80s. As business slowed in the 1990s with the emergence of big-box stores, the needs and habits of the once-prosperous Chicago neighborhood drastically changed. 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. Gates’s film brings together footage from his past exhibitions and projects, such as those at Fondazione Prada, Milan and the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, University of Chicago, alongside interviews with hardware store owners.

The dialogue and screening will take place at Gray Warehouse on July 26. The introduction by Crawford will begin at 6:00 PM, followed by the screening of “How to Sell Hardware” at 6:30 PM. This event is free and open to the public. RSVP is required via EventBrite.

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ABOUT ROMI CRAWFORD

Romi Crawford (PhD) is a cultural theorist and professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her research and writing explore areas of race and ethnicity as these relate to American visual culture (including art, film, and photography). She regularly writes on contemporary art and is co-author of The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago and editor of Fleeting Monuments for the Wall of Respect.

About the exhibition:

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, filling its practical and social needs. The hardware store similarly mirrored the neighborhood’s downturns as business slowed in the 1990s with the emergence of big-box stores which drastically changed the needs and habits of the once-prosperous Chicago neighborhood. 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. Through Gates’s material and conceptual interpositions, How to Sell Hardware memorializes the history of a changing urban landscape.

Gates’s immersive installation at Gray Warehouse offers a repository and material testimony to a bygone era. Amassing and repurposing what physical inventory remained from the store, Gates encases volumes of densely packed material within dozens of stacked metal containers to form a fortifying rampart-like wall that bisects the gallery. A monumental construction, 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 cast aside or obsolete.

“How to Sell Hardware functions as a kind of reconciliation between my relationship to art and the truth of the public sphere,” Gates described. “This exhibition examines my 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. Can a hardware store be considered a work of significance as a hardware store or only after transformation, reformation, dislocation or intervention? Are all works of art not merely a series of joined objects made from things that you find at a corner store?”

The artist’s activation of disused materials in How to Sell Hardware speaks to the longstanding application of archives within his artistic practice. Gates first used the hardware store as a material and conceptual medium in his exhibition, True Value, which debuted at the Fondazione Prada in Milan in 2016. Alongside his work in ceramics, painting, sculpture, installation, music, and performance, Gates’s work with archives—which includes the preservation of Jet and Ebony magazines, as well as the recovery of numerous buildings on Chicago’s South Side—draw from diverse sources and narratives, and invoke the thoughtful examination of oft-neglected or distorted Black cultural and social histories.

Theaster Gates (b.1973) currently lives and works in Chicago. Gates creates works that engage with space theory and land development, sculpture and performance. Drawing on his interest and training in urban planning and preservation, Gates redeems spaces that have been left behind. Known for his recirculation of art world capital, Gates’s practice focuses on the possibility of the “life within things.” His work contends with the notion of Black space as a formal exercise – one defined by collective desire, artistic agency, and the tactics of a pragmatist.

Gates has received numerous awards, including the Crystal Award (2020), Nasher Prize (2018), the KurtSchwitters Prize (2017), the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Award (2016), and the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award for Social Progress (2015). His work can be found in public collections worldwide, including the Menil Collection, Houston; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; the National Gallery of Canada, Ontario; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Tate Gallery, London; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Gates is a professor at the University of Chicago in the Department of Visual Arts and the Harris School of Public Policy.

Theaster Gates: How to Sell Hardware is on view at Gray Warehouse, 2044 West Carroll Avenue, in Chicago from May 28 through July 31, 2021. Gray Warehouse is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 AM – 5 PM CT. To schedule an appointment, click here.

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Tags: Chicago, Documentary Premier: How to Sell Hardware, gray warehouse, How to Sell Hardware, Neear West Side, Romi Crawford, Theaster Gates, Theaster Gates: How to Sell Hardware