Identity issues within artistic practices: which community are you expected to serve?

Who does an artist serve, does an artist need to pay tribute to a community? This issue has been a big aspect in regards to an artist’s identity and what their practice entails. Let us think about Theaster Gates, his practice is often and almost always directly associated with Blackness and geographical location. When two topics like urban planning, and Blackness in a city that has a vivid and not-so-far-off history of red-lining their Black citizens with no resources, Gates’ practice inevitability has racial parameters tied to each of his movements. Now we can look at Gates’ work as a performance of the role he plays and how in surface-level context, his Blackness and his ability to own property in a location that has historically been gate kept is art within itself. Now what if Gate’s identity was completely different? How would we read his practice? The identity of an artist directly influences their artistic practice, but the problem with reading about African-American artists is that every moment of their practice is directly tied to the dark history of how we got to this country and casts a shadow that their fellow non-Black artists do not have to confront or discuss. Slavery was not a one-sided occurrence, so if we continuously expect artists to confront a history that they did not create but were involved in why do we not expect the opposite? Back to my question, how do we read Gates’ work geographically, regionally, socio-economically, and racially? 

We need to read Gates as where he is not who he is in our word, while a Black man, he is also a ceramicist, a man from the West side of Chicago, someone who has lived in Japan, and lived in South Africa, two very culturally different locations from each other as much as from The United States, he is also a performer, from the beginning of his career to his soul food pavilion dinners this is the merit we need to address Gates’ work on. For me, Gates’s Rebuild Foundation feels like the angle someone can pour the historical aspects of Black art in Chicago and analyze Gates as solely a Black artist, but when I think about his sculptural practice and his identity as a social practice identity I think about the parameters for that discipline and directly what is Gates doing amid that work. His social practice identity is extremely interesting and I feel gets often watered down by the larger media intertwining the parameters of “Black” art themes into his work, but social practice is supposed to find the link within a group and a community, and this practice originates from a psychological perspective. His practice often starts from a social-historical influence that inevitably leads into a racial history that he addresses through this artistic practice. Let us think about Amalgam, an exhibition that confronts an island during the 19th century off of Maine, named Malaga. Throughout this exhibition, he is directly influencing how race, territorial laws, and the government all interact. 

While there is room to further explore this topic this week like his repurposing of materials, what I want to do is ignite the thought of how we categorize contemporary artists, and living artists in our society, and what the expectations that we put on artists that exist outside the canon of whiteness where their diversity often pigeon holes them in art criticism? How can we view Gates’ when we do not place his Blackness at the forefront?