THEASTER GATES: OH, YOU’VE GOT TO COME BACK TO THE CITY

GRAY is pleased to announce OH, YOU’VE GOT TO COME BACK TO THE CITY, a solo exhibition by Theaster Gates.

October 16 – December 20, 2025

For the opening night of OH, YOU’VE GOT TO COME BACK TO THE CITY, Theaster Gates invites musician, collaborator, and Black Monks member Marvin Tate to perform in the exhibition. Tate will be accompanied by Hunter Diamond (percussion, vocals), Matthew Lux (bass), and James Sanders (violin) for an improvised set that deconstructs his original composition “City Promenade,” which lends its lyrics to the exhibition title.

In OH, YOU’VE GOT TO COME BACK TO THE CITY, Gates brings together a new series of tar paintings, sculpture, and installation to tell an allegory of the city in decay and the potential contained within its ruins. The exhibition’s title comes from a song by Chicago musician and poet Marvin Tate, in which the City, personified as a character, has cleaned up its act and attempts to lure its residents back from the suburbs.

Gates’s artistic practice has engaged and reframed the cultural and material history of Chicago as material for the studio. His new installation explores the possibilities that lie within the city’s unattended corners. From his stone repository, Gates has selected a family of marble, granite, scholars’ rocks, and concrete forms that anchor a grid-like installation evoking both the planning logic of cities and the quiet order of memorials. Ceramic works and everyday artifacts rest atop each stone, suggesting the remnants left behind by former inhabitants. Surrounding the sculptural installation is a new series of tar paintings that extend Gates’s patching and bonding strategies. Both sculptural and painterly, these works represent a new direction in the series.

In this body of work, Gates wrestles with the burden brought on by aging infrastructure to create new narratives that build on the rich metaphors embedded in his materials—as tools of resistance, signs of excess, and evidence of decline. Developed in conjunction with his exhibition Unto Thee, on view at the Smart Museum of Art through February 22, 2026, OH, YOU’VE GOT TO COME BACK TO THE CITY offers a profound reflection on Gate’s life as a craftsman, urban planner, and pedagogue.