digest for a weary heart

Stephen Colbert interviewed Theaster Gates for a 2014 episode of The Colbert Report. Colbert confessed to feeling something of a contact high from all the charisma and positive energy coming from Gates and then showed images of abandoned Chicago buildings that Gates had bought, restored using reclaimed materials, and filled with collections of local artifacts. In his typical waggish fashion, Colbert deadpanned, “Here’s the thing that worries me about your work: you're turning things into art that I used to not have to think about.” 

Historical materials often find their way into Gates’ artworks or inspire them. Gates’ recent mid-career survey, Young Lords and their Traces, at the New Museum in New York included an abundance of previously under-considered material, now salvaged and repurposed for display. In a museum case, there was a paint-covered boot—one of a pair that artist Sam Gilliam used to wear in the studio. A series of grungy silver paintings made using industrial materials and resembling roof sections, Seven Songs for Black Chapel (2022), hung next to a decommissioned tar kettle that belonged to Gates’ father, a roofer by profession who, like Gilliam, recently passed away.

Born in 1973 in Chicago, Gates studied ceramics, religion, and urban planning. Since 2013, he’s been making headlines as an artist, designer, cataloguer, and convener with a broad frame of reference. In 2009, he founded the nonprofit Rebuild Foundation, a buzzing Chicago arts incubator through which he’s nurturing talent, reinvigorating properties, and hosting events full of ideas, optimism, food, and music. He initiated four retreats for Black artists between 2013 and 2019 and, recently, an experimental design lab in partnership with Prada. There have been major assessments of his work as a process-based artist, a social-practice artist, a potter, an entrepreneur, a musician, and a voice of the Black experience. Here, I aim to describe and respond to a single sculpture that involves writing.

Young Lords and their Traces included the sculpture A Negro Digest for a Weary Heart (2019), which consists of over a hundred books with burgundy-colored covers and gold letters on their spines. The books sit snugly on the wall within a long, box-like, metal shelf, held in all around. They could almost be periodicals from the collection at your local library, but for their titles which read like lines from a poem. The word “Amen” repeats. So do references to nationhood and injustice. If Gates’ writing is a poem or a sculpture/poem, we might compare it to Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” (1855) or Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1956). Like these poems, it wants to consider multitudes—in this case, so many assassinated or wrongly imprisoned and so many who meddle, murder, or otherwise scurry in the dark. “FORGIVE THIS COUNTRY,” Gates writes, “FOR THE GAS CHAMBERS/ FOR THE FIRING SQUADS/ AND THE ELECTRIC CHAIRS… FOR THE WATERGATES/ FOR THE POLITICAL/ ASSASSINATIONS/ AND FOR THE CIA.”

The only book in the group not properly shelved is marked “O GOD.” It lies on its side on top of others that together articulate a prayer for civil rights lawyers:

OH GOD
ASSIST OUR DEFENSE LAWYERS
LEND THY HELP
TO OUR LEGAL COUNSEL
BEFORE THE BAR OF SOUTHERN INJUSTICE

The title of the work harkens to the Langston Hughes poem “The Weary Blues” (1925), which depicts a performer who “makes the piano moan with melody” and wants to put aside despair but cannot. A part of the title of the work is the name of a publication, Negro Digest, the first produced by John Johnson, who later launched Ebony and Jet. The digest ran in the forties and fifties, then again in the sixties. In the seventies, it appeared under the name Black World. It’s unclear whether Gates’ sculpture/poem contains actual magazine issues. A 1961 issue of Negro Digest I found online boasts a powerful contributors list. There’s an essay, “Why I Became an Actor,” by Sidney Poitier. There’s also a text from then president of Guinea, Ahmed Sékou Touré, who helped free his country from France but—we now know—also jailed and killed his political opponents.

Gates’ language seems to synthesize or distill this kind of remindful content that is not always easy to stomach. For instance, his work ambiguously refers to Benjamin Chavis, a leader in the Black community, and Mary Stansel, who accused Chavis of sexual harassment. Gates calls up and inexactly re-registers the historical record. I read the beginning section of his sculpture/poem as part of an indirect conversation with the spirit of history and a loose but warm description of a community. For Gates, community—and perhaps history also—is conflict and despair entangled with love:

HOME
ALMOST RIOTERS
AND PRAGMATISTS
AGAINST THE PRIVILEGED
AND POETS
RECORDING THE SORROW
IN FULL COLOR
I KNOW THE SOUND
I KNOW THE CADENCE
I KNOW THE COMPLEXITY
OF LOVE
IN THIS RACE

A Negro Digest for a Weary Heart is not Gates’ first work of this kind. Other bookshelves hold many other volumes. Walking Prayer (2018-2020) was printed in the catalog for Young Lords and their Traces as a long poem but was not on view in the exhibition. One part involves a fable of sorts:

JANE PITTMANM
AND SIDNEY POITIER
WENT WALKING WITH ARTHUR ASHE
AND CLAYTON POWELL
JANE ASKED THE FELLAS
WHEN YOU IMAGINE HIM, IS JESUS AN ANGRY JESUS
A BABY JESUS
WRAPPED IN SWADDLING CLOTHES?
A FREE JESUS
A PROTESTING JESUS
A SEEABLE JESUS
BLACK WITH RAGE?
THE MEN LOOKED AT EACH OTHER
A COTILLION OF CONFUSION ON THEIR FACES
A DRUM ROLLED
AND POWELL SAID
WALKING POWER IS ENDANGERED POWER
INVISIBLE POWER IS MIGHTY
THERE IS A ROAD TO FREEDOM
AND ON THIS ROAD FRIENDS AND ENEMIES
BOTH FIGHT GOOD
AND WAIT FOR THE TRUMPET

This unlikely cast of characters—the fictional enslaved person, the actor, the tennis great, and the pastor/politician—together contemplate images and concepts of power and freedom. Here, Gates’ totalizing, generous embrace also harkens back to Whitman, who writes in “Song of Myself”: “In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barley-corn less.” Whitman sees himself in seemingly everyone and everything—contralto, carpenter, deacon, policeman, and throng. He calls himself foolish, wise, and “Stuff’d with the stuff that is coarse and stuff’d with the stuff that is fine.”

Gates finds his expression in consistently expanding troves of stuff. Between the Rebuild Foundation and his studio, he stewards a growing number of significant historical collections—the vinyl records of an influential DJ, the contents of a hardware store, art historical glass lantern slides, a library of film and Slavic studies, and a collection of items donated by the Johnson Publishing Company. The library of film and Slavic studies was on view at the New Museum, and I visited the installation of the Johnson collection last year at the Rebuild Foundation. The installation in Chicago incorporates furniture from the publisher’s offices and reclaimed wood suggesting rougher settings. The books and periodicals reach the ceiling. I found myself in front of a shelf with these titles: Black Texans, Growth in the American South, and The Fighting South. Some titles started to feel like parts of poems: Soldiers of Light and Love… The Other Islanders. 

I imagine if Gates were to read these titles or his sculpture/poems aloud, he’d likely start singing, perhaps acapella, perhaps suggesting a work song or an exultant prayer. The artist and writer Coco Fusco asserts that Gates, as a musician, does not try to replicate Black folk music but instead interprets it and abstracts it freely and inventively. “This is an important creative decision,” Fusco argues, “one that implies a refusal to treat cultural roots as static or sacred. There are schools of thought about Black folk traditions that overemphasize cultural retention and insist that authenticity is only achieved through faithful replication of preindustrial forms. That vision of cultures of origin as timeless and unchanging also underlies the association of blackness with the primitive.”

Similarly, as a writer, Gates’ creative decisions are rooted in history but extrapolate from there, inviting others to do the same. His writing acknowledges that every struggle is a struggle among other struggles and points a way forward—not necessarily an easy way, but a way nonetheless. One short but eloquent and hopeful section of book covers from A Negro Digest for a Weary Heart reads:

A STRUGGLE
IN THE MIDDLE OF A STRUGGLE
A WAY
OUT OF NO WAY

From where we stand—stuffed with sometimes coarse stuff—a way out of no way would not be so bad.

1 Langston Hughes, "The Weary Blues, The Collected Works of Langston Hughes (University of Missouri Press, 1987)

2 Coco Fusco, “Of Dark Kept Souls,” Theaster Gates: Young Lords and Their Traces (New Museum, 2022)

Marcus Civin is an Assistant Dean at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. His artwork is centered around writing, and his writing is centered around artwork. In addition to Full Bleed, his writing has appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Art Papers, Afterimage, Boston Art Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Camera Austria, Damn Magazine, Maake Magazine, and other publications. He grew up in Baltimore and appeared in Prince’s last video about the city.