GRAY is a globally recognized team of art professionals devoted to fostering the development of artists’ careers and to building outstanding art collections. For more than six decades GRAY has supported the visions of artists by bringing exhibitions and projects to audiences around the world, working with collectors and institutions to foster practices and preserve legacies.
Founded in Chicago in 1963 as Richard Gray Gallery and since 1997 also in New York City, the gallery, now under the leadership of Paul Gray and Valerie Carberry, continues to be recognized for the exceptional quality of its program and for the expert counsel it provides to private and museum clients worldwide.
Member of Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA)
Image: Installation view of Theaster Gates: OH, YOU’VE GOT TO COME BACK TO THE CITY at GRAY Chicago, 2025.
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Oh, you’ve got to come back to the city, the place where you were born
Oh, you’ve got to come back to the city, the city of dreams
—Marvin Tate, “City Promenade”
OH, YOU’VE GOT TO COME BACK TO THE CITY is a solo exhibition by Theaster Gates. This is Gates’s fourth solo exhibition with GRAY.
In OH, YOU’VE GOT TO COME BACK TO THE CITY, Gates brings together a new series of tar paintings, sculpture, and installation to tell an allegory of the city in decay and the potential contained within its ruins. The exhibition’s title comes from a song by Chicago musician and poet Marvin Tate, in which the City, personified as a character, has cleaned up its act and attempts to lure its residents back from the suburbs.
Gates’s artistic practice has engaged and reframed the cultural and material history of Chicago as material for the studio. His new installation explores the possibilities that lie within the city’s unattended corners. From his stone repository, Gates has selected a family of marble, granite, scholars’ rocks, and concrete forms that anchor a grid-like installation evoking both the planning logic of cities and the quiet order of memorials. Ceramic works and everyday artifacts rest atop each stone, suggesting the remnants left behind by former inhabitants. Surrounding the sculptural installation is a new series of tar paintings that extend Gates’s patching and bonding strategies. Both sculptural and painterly, these works represent a new direction in the series.
In this body of work, Gates wrestles with the burden brought on by aging infrastructure to create new narratives that build on the rich metaphors embedded in his materials—as tools of resistance, signs of excess, and evidence of decline. Developed in conjunction with his exhibition Unto Thee, on view at the Smart Museum of Art through February 22, 2026, OH, YOU’VE GOT TO COME BACK TO THE CITY offers a profound reflection on Gate’s life as a craftsman, urban planner, and pedagogue.
ABOUT THEASTER GATES
Theaster Gates (b. 1973) currently lives and works in Chicago. Gates creates works that engage with space theory and land development, sculpture and performance. Drawing on his interest and training in urban planning and preservation, Gates redeems spaces that have been left behind. Known for his recirculation of art world capital, Gates’s practice focuses on the possibility of the “life within things.” His work contends with the notion of Black space as a formal exercise—one defined by collective desire, artistic agency, and the tactics of a pragmatist.
Gates has received numerous awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship (2025), Crystal Award (2020), Nasher Prize (2018), Kurt Schwitters Prize (2017), American Academy of Arts & Sciences Award (2016), and the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award for Social Progress (2015). His work can be found in public collections worldwide, including the Menil Collection, Houston, Texas; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ontario; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Illinois; Tate Gallery, London, England; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California. Gates is a professor at the University of Chicago in the Department of Visual Arts and the Harris School of Public Policy.
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