The solo show by American artist Theaster Gates (USA, Chicago, 1973) inaugurates the Albuquerque Foundation contemporary programme. Intended as a counterpoint to the Collection’s permanent exhibition, the contemporary programme features pieces by artists working in the expanded field of ceramics, thus fostering other readings of historical pieces. Alongside Gates’ works, the exhibition includes a set of pieces from the Albuquerque Collection, which the artist selected to dialogue with his own.

In recent decades, Theaster Gates’ oeuvre has become increasingly diversified and porous to encompass social activism, music, urban development, sociology and cultural studies. The artist’s gaze seems to constantly glimpse something beyond the boundaries of the visible. His hands and his voice seem to touch, mould and speak of something that does not yet exist, but is nevertheless right there. In the last years, Gates has used the term Afro-Mingei to express the power that wells up from the combination of different creative traditions, such as politically and racially charged black aesthetics and the ceramic traditions of China, Korea and particularly Japan, where the concept of mingei highlights the silent, imperfect beauty of everyday and utilitarian objects.

In Gates’ poetics the fascination with the actual and potential modes of fusion between disparate cultures is at once utopian and realistic in its deep commitment to the construction of a more equitable world or, at least, in its quest for more inclusive, cooperative and organic forms of collaboration and creation — issues which are crucial to the contemporary cultural debate.

The large-scale installation proposed by Gates echoes and reverberates the notions of cultural and merchandise circulation central to most porcelain pieces in the Albuquerque Collection. The black ceramic floor tiles were designed by a black American artist who studied the craft with Japanese masters. The tiles were made in Japan and shown at a museum in Tokyo. They arrived in Portugal after weeks at sea, following a trajectory very similar to the pieces in the Collection, including those chosen by the artist to share the exhibition space with his works and engage in a mutually enriching and complexifying dialogue. The dark, dense floor imbues the space with a quasi-sacred aura; stepping on it turns the act of walking into a conscious and deliberate gesture filled with stories of other places and other people, including all of us.

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