It’s something of a surprise that Theaster Gates and Siddhartha Mitter first met just 2 years ago, when Mitter profiled the polymath artist for The New York Times. While Gates’s practice spans everything from ceramics to urban planning and Mitter wields the pen or collaborates on exhibitions, as he did as editor-in-chief with the team creating the main exhibition in the 2026 Venice Biennale, their careers have developed in tandem, driven by a strong social vision and the need to further Black culture and center creators beyond the White Western hegemony. Brought together again for this year’s Art Basel Awards – in the Established Artist and Media and Storyteller categories, respectively – this like-minded pair took the opportunity to sit down and discuss some of the big questions around their work.

Siddhartha Mitter: Your work as an artist, maker, and convener is very closely associated with place: Chicago’s South Side, and a few other places in the world where you have [grown] rhizomatic roots. To what extent does your work operate on its own place-logic?

Theaster Gates: The truth is, I never stopped being from Mississippi, even though I was born in Chicago. For a long time, I would say, ‘Mississippi is my Africa.’ When I think of diasporicity, I think about how there are so many people from around the world that are from Mississippi. I’m also connected to another diaspora which happens to be the continent of Africa. [In terms of] my making, I often say that my hands are as much from Chicago as they are from Japan. I choose to work, almost as a political position, from Chicago. To remain deeply connected to a place means that I’m able to go deeper into a set of comprehensive politics. I can think about what it means to be The Second City [as Chicago is known]. I can think about what it means to be a Black and Brown state inside of a larger White state.

SM: Are there philosophies or principles that are central to your practice? 

TG: I’m currently organizing an exhibition rooted around one artist, Marlene Dumas, and her painting ‘Love your Neighbor’ (1994). That title feels like it could have been pulled from the New Testament. The title could be a vestige of the Quran or in Torah, in terms of ideas around hospitality. Your neighbors are family. A stranger is a neighbor. You should love them. I’ve tried to live between that biblical idea and what bell hooks calls us to do, which is to try to have a manifesto of love. I got to a point where it felt like I had more to offer the world outside of the small bubble of art. Galleries, collectors, museums, they’re a part of my neighbor set, but in fact, the person next door or down the street is also part of my neighbor set. Marlene Dumas is a White South African who, in 1994, at the moment when the constitution is being created and apartheid ends, is thinking: ‘What ways should my politics be aligned with my spiritual beliefs, social practice, and studio practice?’ In this moment, I’m really trying to adopt an ethos of love. And I’m trying to make that evident in my politics, sociality, and work. 

SM: I think that one of the connecting points ethically and philosophically between what you’re doing, what I try to do, and many others around us, is that it’s civic work. Working in culture, journalism, writing, editing, co-curating and so forth, I always think about who are we doing this work for? For the field, which is the artists, the art workers, the people in the back of the museum. That’s one side of the triangle. We’re doing it for the public, which is the second side of the triangle. The third side of the triangle is the canon, history, the future researchers, and the archive. We are working within that triangle and thinking in all those directions at the same time. That’s a way of making civic work, delivering on the promise of creative work, which opens social possibility.

TG: Siddhartha, you’ve written on Ibrahim Mahama, Hamza Walker, Kara Walker, Jennie C. Jones, Steve McQueen, and María Berrío, [and created] canonical triumphs of writing. If [writing those articles was] anything like the time we spent together – you coming to Chicago, us going to Japan together, and breaking bread – I just think, man, what an accumulation of stories and knowledge. What a gift your job must be: to write. But it’s a lot of tabs to keep open. You’re writing at a clip. How do you keep the writing fresh for yourself?

SM: It’s complicated. If we’re going to be 100% true about it, we’re writing into an industry and an economics where writers in general are not paid enough and often don’t have enough spaces to deploy the work at the level of care, quality, and civic reach that it could potentially have. We’re [also] operating under constraint. Many artists will say that a constraint can also bring out some really interesting work. So we’re also trying to work within the constraint and break a few things.

TG: You’ve allowed artists’ works to make it to the page, which is a way of embedding artists into the national and world archive. I can’t thank you enough for what you’ve done for artists and the ways in which your practice dovetails with the stream of consciousness that artists are working through.

SM: I’m drawn to collaborating with makers who are trying to realize something that is at once for themselves and for the world. I want to thank you for embodying practices that welcome the world in ways that are profoundly democratic. It’s something we all try to manifest.