Theaster Gates' 'The Gift and The Renege' highlights the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston's summer programming

A new exhibition of Theaster Gates’ large-scale paintings, sculpture, and installation work depicting the complex dynamics – both seen and unseen – undergirding the architecture and everyday lives of marginalized communities across the United States is coming to the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH) this summer. 

In Theaster Gates: The Gift and The Renege, the museum will realize the crowning artistic fete of its ongoing community-focused Rebirth in Action historic preservation initiative. The multifaceted initiative, in which CAMH has partnered with Gates and the Houston Freedmen's Town Conservancy (HFTC), targeted the so-named historic district in the city's Fourth "Mother" Ward for a restorative elevation of its continued existence as an inspirational crucible and the "Crown Jewel of the Emancipation Trail" in the Black community after 1865. 

"The Gift and The Renege is my sculptural attempt to demonstrate the ways that industrial landscapes, displacement, and the historical fight for land rights push the boundaries of modernist and formalist architectural approaches in my practice,” Gates describes.

"When you think about the history and the legacy of Black people in Houston, you don’t often know that Freedmen’s Town is the mother ward. You don’t know how important it is to the entire Juneteenth story that the entire country is celebrating,” HFTC Executive Director Zion Escobar told ESSENCE last year in a preview. “We have people in other countries celebrating the Juneteenth story that really is about something that happened between Galveston and Houston. And that is an incredible gap that needs to be filled,”

The exhibition is open to the public now and will remain on view through the October 20th. Ryan N. Dennis and Hesse McGraw are listed as its co-curators.