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Theaster Gates’ art at CTA station will nod to African-American experience

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Designs were unveiled Wednesday for Theaster Gates' planned art installation — a space made to look like a radio station that will host real, live DJs —at the Red Line's 95th Street station, which is being overhauled and is set to open next year.

During an afternoon event on the South Side, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Gates showed off renderings of the world-renowned artist's planned work. In addition to the radio station, which will go in a former concession space at the terminal, there will be decorative tapestries made from old fire hoses.

The radio station reflects a "sacred space" involving music that is cherished by many African-Americans, while the tapestries hark back to the civil rights movement when fire hoses were also weapons against African-Americans marching for equality, Gates said.

Ideas for the installation came from long conversations with community residents, who were adamant that his artwork nod to a rich past and a hopeful future.

The projects also reflect Gates' favorite types of projects: using art to create a space and reusing old materials to create something new.

"None of us wants to spend our lives walking past an eyesore, having to get on an eyesore," Gates said. "When I was asked by the (CTA) to participate in this, I was super excited because it meant there was another way by which we could share beauty in black and brown neighborhoods."

Emanuel praised Gates as an innovative, socially conscious artist whose work will highlight the renovated train station. The Chicago artist's projects have included repurposing old, dilapidated structures on the South Side — including the Stony Island Arts Bank.

City officials have said Gates' artwork will complement the new, $280 million 95th Street bus and rail terminal, a massive transit hub that serves the Far South Side.

The installation will be the largest public art project in the agency's history when it opens next year.

A West Side native, Gates, 43, the youngest of nine children and a graduate of Lane Tech College Prep, is also the director of the University of Chicago's Arts and Public Life initiative. He also runs a nonprofit that reclaims shabby homes in the Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood and has designed a park and theater complex in Washington Park expected to be finished by 2020.

Once completed, the 95th Street terminal's artwork will be the 72nd art project at a CTA train station, officials said.

The new station will provide better access to buses and could be the starting point of a new branch of the Red Line — a 5.3-mile extension from 95th to 130th Street, to carry the "L" into an area that community advocates call a transit desert.

Officials are hopeful that modernizing the terminal that opened in 1969 will provide better transit access and economic opportunity to South Side riders.

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