ABSTRACT
The religious impulse in black cultures is one of the most enduring tropes for both native informants and colonialists. Gospel music, the storefront church, the black oratory, the suffering Christ equated with violence against black bodies, and the black Madonna, are among the many symbols associated with black American religion. The most relevant way that Theaster Gates’ art and architectural practices resonate with notions of the black church is his investment “in the construction of spaces of black autonomy”. Although often couched in private spirituality, the invocation of black religious symbolism engages what Houston Baker has called “black publicness”. In 1936 William Edouard Scott painted the Life of Christ murals at Pilgrim Baptist Church in Chicago, the birthplace of gospel and one of the first megachurches in the United States. In Titus Kaphar’s Ascension, the artist replaces the figure of a black basketball player making a layup with that of a dead Christ figure from a sixteenth-century painting.
