Sara-Zewde

Theaster Gates’s June 2026 Freedmen’s Town Pavilion in Houston, co-designed with Sara Zewde of Studio Zewde, completes a sixteen-year arc that began in 2010 with the founding of Rebuild Foundation in Chicago. Read end to end, the Theaster Gates commissions catalogue is less a portfolio of artworks than a sustained argument that buildings — specifically the abandoned, the redlined, the bombed-out and the deconsecrated — are the strongest medium available to a Black American artist born in 1973 on the South Side. Stony Island Arts Bank, Huguenot House, Bristol’s Temple Church, the 2022 Serpentine Pavilion and the Houston pavilion belong to a single body of work, and the through-line is structural rather than stylistic. ...