2023 Vincent Scully Prize Presentation: Theaster Gates

Theaster Gates was the twenty-fifth recipient of the National Building Museum's annual Vincent Scully Prize. Representative of the Museum’s institutional Pillars of Innovation and Equity, Gates’ bold and life-affirming attention to the overlooked and the everyday is very much in the spirit of Vincent Scully’s scholarship, melding Art, Architecture, and Urban Design. His unique global practice, which is rooted in Chicago, translates the intricacies of Blackness through space theory and land development, sculpture, and performance. Through the expansiveness of his approach as a thinker, maker, and builder, he extends the role of the artist as an agent of change. Drawing on his interest and training in urban planning and preservation, Gates redeems spaces that have been left behind, focusing on the possibility of the “life within things.” Twice named as one of the 100 most powerful people in the art world by ArtReview, Gates has pioneered a new model of land art and community investment that has been celebrated, revered and held as a sterling example by city planners, architects, artists and innovators alike.