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Amazing Grace
John Haberin New York City
Theaster Gates and Willie Birch
Can a midcareer retrospective have three floors, one each for the artist's progenitors? Kinship for Theaster Gates includes not just his mother and father, but also abstract artists, potters, musicians, and the African American community wherever he happens to go. They speak to one another as well, but the clearest voice is still his own, at the New Museum.
Willie Birch may be keeping up with the neighborhood or the news. For the black community, they have a way of blending together. So do past and present, in scenes that could be breaking before his eyes or persisting for as long as he can remember, and he cannot easily forget. 
He will not let others, black and white, forget either. For thirty-five years now, his art has been bearing witness. It is "Chronicling Our Lives."
Bricking over whiteness
Theaster Gates has been a formidable presence for some years now, most of all when he hardly appears. Was that him singing "Amazing Grace" on the streets of Harlem, for a show on the theme of the Great Migration—or witnessing ruin in a black church for Birch or "Grief and Grievance"? Was he no more than a voice at the Studio Museum, asserting that "my complexion is political"? The New Museum makes a point of his vocal talent, starting in church as a child. But then that, too, was just one more way of witnessing and reaching out. Among his largest works is an entire library.
Those voices need not have been his, and a video captures another man singing that very song. With an overgrown white beard, Billy looks like no more than an old coot, but he will win you over—to him, to the song, and to their heritage in blackness. He won over Gates for sure, and the camera's close-up brings home his care. That library, too, is someone's personal project—a black scholar of Russian literature, Robert Bird. The point, Bird's wife writes, is "care for the archive and the heavy weight of history."
Other voices come naturally to Gates, like her ancestors to Emma Amos. A second video takes him to Montana, where he had a grant and a studio to make pottery. One can feel the pleasure he takes in working blobs of clay and seeing them take shape as the wheel spins, as if of their own accord. Then a trumpet player wanders in, calling up the free spirit of free jazz. The artist cannot resist opening his mouth to join right in. And then he steps outside for the breath of cold air in the snow and the voices in his head.
If those voices had been his, his complexion was nowhere to be seen. It took him many exhibitions, here and abroad, to land a solo show in New York, in 2020, but it brought him to as formidable a gallery as they come. And its most formidable presence was an all but empty room. Not that I expected to see him there on an ordinary afternoon in Chelsea, but it spoke throughout of his history. His father was a roofer, which accounts for his use of tar, in paintings that might pass for a roofer's tarps. Their fields of red and black would hold up decently enough against mid-century artists like Clyfford Still, Deborah Remington, and Robert Motherwell, but the colors alone convey the darkness of African American skin and African American history.
Born in 1973, he may have had in mind his father's devotion to crude materials as well when he took up pottery. Sculpture without pedestals looks like ship irons, maybe from a slave ship. Like Melvin Edwards or Sanford Biggers, Gates uses abstraction to speak of blackness. The 2020 show was his "Black Vessel." There he put out plenty of black vessels in a back room. That room also served as a corridor from abstract paintings to an installation—and that, too, began with an old-time worker at his weighty craft.
Gates fires sculpture at incredible temperatures, and much the same process produced black bricks that covered all four gallery walls. They covered, too, an exclusive gallery's whiteness, floor to ceiling. One could feel their collective weight and the room's collective emptiness. It held little more than a slim, tall chamber, for shelves like another private library. Where a group show in Harlem drew on Ebony as inspiration, this library held every issue. It was his New Egypt.
Kinship and community
One could call the New Museum's second floor his father's, and it includes a kettle that the older man used to haul tar, as Sweet Chariot. Those torched paintings have the wall off the elevator, as a fitting introduction. A facing work, around the back of the elevators, looks silvery from bitumen and oil-based enamel applied to copper. Its seven panels show their wear, each assembled from whatever metal strips Gates could find, in buildings that had felt the wrecking ball. Still, they are Seven Songs for Black Chapel. The voices never stop and are never alone.
What of his mother? One might call the top floor hers for Queen Mother, My Madonna alone, in what could easily pass for centuries old African art. Yet it belongs to more traditions than I care to say. The floor also has Bathroom Believer, of porcelain tiles and seventeen rows of lights. His mother retreated into the bathroom to pray. Seven speakers, in a row along the back wall, could be replying to her prayers with A Heavenly Chord.
The floor between makes the case for community. Framed by the two videos, it has a single large room for nearly forty sculptures—Black Vessels for the Traces of Our Young and Their Spirits, after the Young Lords, an activist group in his native Chicago. They could offer a tour of much of the Metropolitan Museum, from African art to an exhibition of Stone Bluff Manufactory, in and around the American Civil War. And the retrospective includes a storage jar by the manufactory's leading light, David Drake, and My Name Is Dave, a hymnal. One can almost hear Gates singing and his mother praying. Actual African art turns up as a wild boar wrapped in cheesecloth, for a grateful reminder of a power symbol and a bitter reminder of whiteness.
The curators, Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari with Madeline Weisburg, include artists quoted in his work, including Frank Stella, Agnes Martin, and Sam Gilliam in abstraction. Gilliam's speaks to a boot painted freely, which in turn speaks to sneakers by Virgil Abloh and to a tribute to Abloh by Arthur Jafa. But then the artist's mother speaks in turn to the heavenly speakers and an old church organ, a seeming Liberty Bell, metal salvaged from destruction in Chicago, and wood flooring from the Park Avenue Armory, assembled into what she might see as crosses or wings. They could also pass for Stella's early stripe paintings without the paint. They might be distinct works, a single installation, or a true community.
Does doting on a lifestyle magazine trap the black male in a sad racial history or make it his own, and does a towering new Egypt stand for the Biblical slaves that baked bricks or a new idolatry? Charles Demuth had his own ambivalence when he painted a gleaming Pennsylvania factory in 1927, as My Egypt. The large bricked room in 2020 had shelves, too, for uniformly bound volumes of African American history and culture, and the New Museum has that Negro Digest for a Weary Heart. In past shows, Gates has furnished a gallery as a living room too costly to touch, for an imposing welcome. He has set out shipping pallets, along with a shoeshine stand and a vintage lamppost—out on the street at the 2010 Whitney Biennial. Nostalgia, it seems, gets along just fine with the hard work of moving on and moving in.
Gates takes off in lots of directions and sends lots of messages. He has made a flag of fire hoses for the Whitney's "Incomplete History of Protest," much as David Hammons has given an American flag and, with his Body Prints, a map of the United States African American colors—and much as Howardena Pindell has documented how police turned water on civil-rights protestors, ripping off their skin. He has collaborated on a billboard in praise of black power on the great American highway. If he seems to leave his mark everywhere, bear in mind that the billboard came as part of a collective, the For Freedoms initiative. Do the shelves seem less a resource than, as their title has it, his Walking Prayer? They are waiting for time and the American experience to fill them.
Making the news
With a title like Johnny Makes the Nightly News, you can probably see what is coming. An African American surely will. Johnny lies face down in the street, knees bent as if he were still falling, but it is too late by now. The emergency crew cannot help him, however caring, and the ambulance at left is half out of the frame, as if it were heading out. Onlookers at back are already grieving, apart from one with a camera moving in for a close-up. 
Willie Birch painted this in 1988, but the news is still breaking.
It might be news of Black Lives Matter, but the vintage portable camera testifies otherwise, like shelves stacked with boom boxes and old TVs still playing for Martin Luther King, McDonald's & Miami's Burning the next year. It might be news filtered though white fears of violent crime today, but Birch treats everyone with respect, even when he is not sure who bears responsibility. He sees Terror at the Towers, where the children are sad and adults missing in action. He sees a Ritual of Inevitable Violence, and who can say how it began and how it could ever end? The street scene looks as vivid as the nightly news, but a black margin contains a skeleton, a tombstone, and a gun. The gun is simple and also black, but text insists that it is real—much as the confusion of real and toy guns ends in police killings today.
Birch has every reason for anger. Cash Rules Everything, a title announces, with a bust of George Washington fresh out of a dollar bill. Paintings rely heavily on hand-lettered text for their irony—colorful text in more ways than one. Another title worries that Violence Is More Today, but "It Was Legal" then. "I Am a Progressive White Person," another voice chimes in below. Still, Birch is listening.
When he looks at Asian or Native Americans alongside African Americans, he sees a history of mutual terror and exploitation, but still "We Are All in the Same Boat." He keeps his sense of humor, too, although Black Humor cannot so easily ditch Amos and Andy. Above all, he holds onto that sense of community, where a boy can fly a kite, even in what looks like a war zone. The appliance store was a part of life, where people strapped for cash and eager for the news dropped by. A woman wears an apron while listening to the radio, and a contemporary eye may see only sexism, but in a middle-class black home. She is Keeping Up with the Iran Contra Hearings (the investigation into Ronald Reagan's arming of right-wing death squads), and the person on an old-fashioned land line is Keeping in Touch.
Most of the show dates to its first ten years, when the New Orleans artist called New York home. He knew his way around, though—to the Cherokee nation and to an altar with prayers for Latin America. The church looks surreal to the point of creepy, between its outsized crucifix, its dead Jesus under glass, and an overflow of votive candles below that. Still, it welcomes all, much like Old Matthews Murkland Presbyterian Church before North Carolina whites burned it down, in painted papier-mâché. Murkland might be a real community or just a state of mind. The residents of a precarious house in another sculpture, Lotto Dream, must know that state well.
Born in 1942, Birch has seen plenty, and his work might have been around longer. He draws on folk art for the childish materials of his sculpture. He evokes it, too, with the flat colors and black outlines of his paintings—although a recent shift to black and white lends a sophisticated chill. Yet he can still temper their naïve or strident tones with a sense of humor and a sense of home. Everyone he knows, they seem to say, is an outsider, artists included. The nightly news can be hard to bear, and so can memories, but he can take comfort in the fluid boundaries between past and present.
Theaster Gates ran at Gagosian through January 23, 2021, and at the New Museum through February 5, 2023, Willie Birch at Fort Gansevoort through June 25, 2022.