Black Chapel | Serpentine Pavilion 2022 | Theaster Gates

Black Chapel draws inspiration from many of the architectural typologies that ground the artist’s practice. The structure references the bottle kilns of Stoke-on-Trent in England, the beehive kilns of the Western United States, San Pietro and the Roman tempiettos and traditional African building structures such as the Musgum mud huts of Cameroon and the Kasabi Tombs of Kampala, Uganda.

Drawn to the transcendental environment of the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, Gates has produced a series of new tar paintings especially for Black Chapel. Determined to create a space that reflects the artist’s hand and sensibilities, seven panels hang from the interior structure. In these works, Gates honours his father’s craft as a roofer and uses roofing strategies and torch down, which requires an open flame to heat the material and affix it to the surface.

An operating bronze bell, salvaged from St. Laurence, a landmark Catholic Church that once stood in Chicago’s South Side, stands next to the entrance of the Pavilion. Underscoring the erasure of spaces for convening and spiritual communion in urban communities, the historic bell acts as a call to assembly, congregation and contemplation throughout the summer’s events.

Theaster Gates said: “The name Black Chapel is important because it reflects the invisible parts of my artistic practice. It acknowledges the role that sacred music and the sacred arts have had on my practice, and the collective quality of these emotional and communal initiatives. Black Chapel also suggests that in these times there could be a space where one could rest from the pressures of the day and spend time in quietude. I have always wanted to build spaces that consider the power of sound and music as a healing mechanism and emotive force that allows people to enter a space of deep reflection and deep participation.”

The Serpentine Pavilion 2022 is open every day from 10am to 6pm.

Gates’ Serpentine Pavilion 2022: Black Chapel follows The Question of Clay, a multi-institution project featuring exhibitions at Whitechapel Gallery (September 2021 – January 2022), White Cube (September – October 2021) and a two-year long research project at the V&A.

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Theaster Gates’ Statement

Since the time I was invited to consider a commission for Serpentine, Black Chapel has evolved several times. Initially, when I considered the volume of the chapel, I was preoccupied with the early architectural forms that would manifest themselves in the manufactured world. The kilns of Stoke- on-Trent, the beehive kilns of the Western United States, monumental spaces like San Pietro and the Roman tempiettos. Over time, the ideas around the chapel started to expand to include more spiritually dynamic and culturally specific spaces like the Musgum mud huts of Cameroon and the 

Kasubi tombs of Kampala, Uganda.
What has remained consistent is a desire to pay homage to craft and manufacturing traditions, found especially on the African continent, in England and in the United States. These architectural forms, and the varying ways that they hold space, for people and for sacred moments, matter to me. I’m invested in how these forms produce energy and amplify sound, creating space for the sonic and the silent.

For Black Chapel, I have created a suite of seven new tar paintings for the interior. With the recent passing of my father, the Pavilion resembles a memorial, not only to the legacy he shared with me, but also to the ways in which his vocation has become my vocation. Black Chapel seems to hold ways of working. Through space, the vessel produces ways of being together and ways of understanding each other by being adjacent to one another. Black Chapel is a vessel and a container for those who choose to gather.

Black Chapel offers a reflection on several important moments within my practice. Most notably is its namesake, a work stemming from a commission I received from the late curator Okwui Enwezor, to activate the central atrium of Haus der Kunst in Munich, built by and for the Nazi Regime. Black Chapel (2019) was my attempt to breathe Black spiritual life into this “sanctuary for war.” My Pavilion Black Chapel continues my professional investment in the creation and preservation of structures for spiritual possibilities.

Black Chapel is important because it reflects the invisible parts of my artistic practice. It acknowledges the role that sacred music and ritual have had on my practice and the collective quality of these emotive forces and communal initiatives. In this sense, Black Chapel is a platform through which great artistic moments in music and conviviality might happen. Black Chapel also suggests that in these times there could be a space where one could rest, reflect deeply, and spend time in quietude. It is my hope that Black Chapel will achieve the honorific, interrogate the sacred and encourage the social.

Theaster Gates, June 2022