Rebuild Foundation was founded in 2009 by artist and social innovator Theaster Gates. Founded with the intent to empower communities and support emerging artists, the Rebuild Foundation is a platform for art, cultural development, and neighborhood transformation.

The foundation is part of a network of organizations created to uplift the South Side of Chicago. Their vision is based on using art and culture for progress and development.

The foundation empowers the community through different initiatives by providing free art programs, creating new cultural spaces, and developing affordable housing, studios, and work spaces for the community of South Side Chicago. They restore old historical buildings to create new community spaces, blowing life into old forgotten places and inspiring the potential within the community. 

The face behind the foundation

Theaster Gates is a potter by training and a social activist by vocation. Just like his pottery, Gates enjoys shaping things and the process of turning nothing into something beautiful. His works focus on sculpture, performance, and urban planning and preservation.

An international award-winning artist and professor at the University of Chicago in the visual arts department, Gates is a visionary in redefining how we look at urban spaces that serve our communities. The way that Gates blends art & culture with social practice shows us that there are multiple perspectives we can use to look at community engagement and how we connect with art. There’s something quite poetic about reutilizing spaces that are damaged and forgotten by time in hopes of lifting areas that are often damaged and forgotten by society. 

One of the first projects of the Rebuild Foundation was the Stony Islands Arts Bank. An abandoned old bank built in the early 1920s that was restored and repurposed to serve the community of South Side Chicago.

A multi-purpose space for art and cultural events, it is used today by local artists and members of the community. It includes an archive collection with a vast variety of media, such as a collection of over 60,000 glass lantern slides covering art and architectural history throughout times and books and publications from the African American Publisher, Johnson Publishing Company, with copies dated since the 1940s.

Another project of the foundation, in partnership with Brinshore Developers, architects Landon, Bone, Baker, and the Chicago Housing Authority, is based on the idea of creating a living space for locals. In hopes of responding to the continuous abandonment of the neighborhoods in South Side Chicago due to extreme poverty, the project comprised 32 housing units, including a shared space for theater and dance, aimed at residents that receive low-income housing support in the area.

On his website, Gates reflects on the importance of these types of interventions, “As a life practitioner, the possible interventions and engagements are endless. Rather than only intervening with these subjective, museum-based projects, I had to try to do something that had weight in concrete space; black space. While it remains one of the least discussed projects of my practice, DAHC is one of the most relevant and fulfilling for me.”

Hoping to impact the fashion and design industry, the Experimental Design Lab project was built in 2021 from a partnership between Prada, the Rebuild Foundation, and Dorchester Industries, a design and manufacturing platform from Gates.

The idea with the Experimental Design lab was to support emerging designers of color from Chicago and beyond by expanding their visibility, promoting mentorship and collaboration, as well as building a network of important connections that could potentially support and enhance the works of these artists. From a variety of areas, from fashion to dance, to product design, to culinary arts, the participants of the project were nominated based on their creative potential in their industries. This project is an 18-month fellowship where the participants receive financial and leadership support for their creations.

In an interview with the Chicago Tribute, Gates reinforced the need for projects such as the Experimental Design Lab,

“For too long, there has been an evident pipeline and visibility barrier for designers of color working across the creative industries, and the Dorchester Industries Experimental Design Lab not only challenges the notion that Black talent is hard to identify but also serves as an inescapable answer to it. It is a tremendous honor to be able to celebrate, support, and amplify the work of these designers working to enrich our collective understanding of and interactions with design.”