Theaster Gates
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Theaster Gates is a potter, a sculptor, a film-maker, a curator of black history, a real estate developer and a professor of fine art in Chicago, where he lives - and where he\\u2019s also transformed a whole run-down area near the university. When he was made a professor in 2007, he bought a derelict bank for a dollar, tore out the urinals, cut them up and sold them off at five thousand dollars each as artworks \\u2013 thereby raising enough money to create a large new art centre. That was just the beginning, as he explains. Gates\\u2019s art and installation work is shown all over the world, and current projects include a library for Obama and this year\\u2019s Serpentine Pavilion building. As his recent show at the Whitechapel revealed, his work is ambitious and provocative - he takes pots and deconstructs them so that they\\u2019re exploding, back to the original clay. He films his work in dream-like spaces - a huge abandoned factory, for instance, full of broken bricks and haunting music, including his own singing.
Theaster Gates is also a musician, the founder of a group called The Black Monks of Mississippi, which aims to rescue old songs from the black South. He brings Michael Berkeley a playlist that includes Scott Joplin, Joseph Boulogne, Rachmaninoff and gospel music sung by Leontyne Price.
A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3\\nProduced by Elizabeth Burke
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