Gallery Talk: Theaster Gates, Michelle Grabner, and Zachary Cahill

Richard Gray Gallery is pleased to host Theaster Gates, Michelle Grabner, and Zachary Cahill for a panel discussion on the occasion of Theaster Gates: Every Square Needs a Circle at Gray Warehouse. Grabner and Cahill will join Gates to discuss his exhibition in depth as it relates to his larger practice.

The panel will take place at Gray Warehouse on Wednesday, June 19th. The gallery talk begins at 6:00 PM, and will be followed by a short reception. This event is free and open to the public. RSVP is requested to rsvp@richardgraygallery.com. Seating is limited.

Every Square Needs a Circle presents new sculpture, installation, tar paintings, and neon work by Theaster Gates. Relating moments from art history to stories of quotidian labor, Every Square Needs a Circle is a rumination on materials, time and repetition. The exhibition also marks a continuation of Gates’s long engagement with the work of American sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois, whose examination of genius and progress in Black America from Emancipation to the mid-20th century has been a source of inspiration for the artist. Placing his interest in poetics and the history of objects, Gates’s multi-faceted installation bridges the work of Du Bois with architectural excerpts from Chicago, expounding on the archives that hold and preserve records of Black intelligence.

ABOUT MICHELLE GRABNER
Michelle Grabner is an artist, writer, and curator. She is the Crown Professor of Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she has taught since 1996. Grabner has also held teaching appointments at The University of Wisconsin-Madison, Cranbrook Academy of Art; Yale Norfolk; Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts at Bard College; Yale University School of Art; and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Grabner co-curated the 2014 Whitney Biennial and the 2016 Portland Biennial, and was the Artistic Director for FRONT International, the 2018 Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art. Her writings hava been published in X-tra and Artforum, and in 2010, Grabner co-edited THE STUDIO READER with Mary Jane Jacob, which was published by the University of Chicago Press. Grabner’s work has been the subject of surveys at a number of institutions including The Indianapolis Museum of Art, MOCA Cleveland, Illinois State Galleries, and INOVA at University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. Grabner’s other projects include The Suburban, an art space which she co-founded alongside her husband and Brad Killam in 1999 in Oak Park, Illinois; and The Poor Farm in rural Waupaca County, Wisconsin, a space dedicated to annual historical and contemporary exhibitions, lectures, performances, publications, screenings, and alternative educational programs.

ABOUT ZACHARY CAHILL
Zachary Cahill is an American interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago and the Director of Fellowships and Programs at the University of Chicago's Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry. Cahill is also the founding editor-in chief of Portable Gray, the Gray Center' s biannual magazine.
 Cahill received an MFA from the University of Chicago (2007) and a BFA from Cornell University (1995).  His practice incorporates installation, painting, sculpture, séance performance, video, and artistic writings that examine the nature of propaganda, state power and its relation to the individual, religion, and a variety of forms of socio-political infrastructures. His work has been exhibited in numerous venues in the United States and Europe, and his writings have appeared in Afterall, Artforum, Critical Inquiry, Frieze, Mousseand other arts and academic publications. In 2018, he published his first novel, The Black Flame of Paradise,released by Mousse Publishing.