Great article on Theaster Gates in the NY Times.
Chicago's Opportunity Artist
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/ma...anted=all&_r=0
Gates now owns 12 properties in the vicinity of his home. Rebuild Foundation, the nonprofit he created to run Dorchester Projects, teaches video production at the nearby middle school and sewing and design for local kids. It has begun work in Omaha and St. Louis as well, transforming properties there into community-art spaces. Gates is still full time at the University of Chicago, currently as the director of Arts and Public Life, heading an arts incubator that the university opened this year in the poor black neighborhood outside its traditional western boundary. Additionally, Gates’s nonprofit and a private development company are turning a shuttered public-housing project near Dorchester Projects into a 32-unit mixed-income complex. Starting next year, it will become home both to low-income families and to emerging artists who will do the programming at its on-site art center. Richard Sciortino, one of the development company’s owners, believes that this concept of the public-housing artist colony is something that can work elsewhere, and he and Gates are already looking into converting a couple of other housing projects on the East Coast.