Theaster Gates - African Still Life #3: A Tribute to Patric McCoy and Marva Jolly

Commissioned by the Smart Museum of Art for the Threshold series. This installation builds on Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates's ongoing investigation of accumulation, ritual, and the material afterlives of friends and loved ones. Presented as an open-storage museum cabinet, African Still Life #3: A Tribute to Patric McCoy and Marva Jolly serves as an homage to friends whose care influenced Gates early in his artistic career: Patric McCoy is a longtime collector of contemporary African-American art and African artifacts, and Marva Lee Pitchford-Jolly was a ceramic artist and influential teacher. African Still Life #3 features two collections that have recently entered Gates's care: the Muguette and Lucien Guenneguez Collection of African objects, and the collection of Dinh Nguyen, a French-Vietnamese DJ whose interests spanned Caribbean music, jazz, British R&B, ska, and reggae. Taken together, the installation invites reflection on cultural heritage and spiritual traditions, the French colonial imagination expressed through object-making, archiving and Black futures, and form and sound.