Builder
When Theaster Gates acquired the former Stony Island Trust & Savings Bank on Chicago’s South Side, the building had been vacant for decades. Its roof and plaster ceilings were deteriorating, water had damaged large portions of the interior, and demolition was approaching.
Gates bought the building from the City of Chicago for $1 in 2012 and set out to give it another life.
The bank had opened in 1923 as a neighborhood financial institution. Designed by William Gibbons Uffendell, its neoclassical façade, tall columns, and ornate interior had once made it a landmark along Stony Island Avenue. By the time Gates intervened, much of that architectural fabric was in serious disrepair.
Through his nonprofit Rebuild Foundation, Gates assembled the funding and team needed to restore the building. The work repaired the façade and entrance, stabilized plaster walls and ceilings, reconstructed the deteriorating rear balcony, and transformed water-damaged offices into a two-story library. The basement’s bank vault and decorative grilles were also uncovered and preserved.
The restored Stony Island Arts Bank opened in October 2015, becoming a 17,000-square-foot cultural institution with galleries, archives, a library, and spaces for performances and community programs.
Inside, the building now holds collections that might otherwise have been dispersed or lost: books and periodicals from Johnson Publishing Company, publisher of Ebony and Jet; the personal record collection of house-music pioneer Frankie Knuckles; thousands of art-history lantern slides; and the Edward J. Williams Collection, which preserves and examines racist historical objects.
The Arts Bank is the most visible example of a larger practice Gates has developed across Chicago’s South Side. He began with vacant houses on Dorchester Avenue, transforming them into spaces for books, music, art, and gathering. Rather than treating those buildings as disposable, he used their restoration to create new cultural resources in the neighborhood.
The work has since extended into housing, schools, gardens, and other spaces. Gates’s approach begins with a physical question: what can an existing building become if someone is willing to take responsibility for it, assemble the resources, and imagine a use that serves the surrounding community?
The answer has become a growing collection of buildings with new purposes—and new reasons for people to gather in them.
Gates’s work is distinctive because the buildings are not merely backdrops for art. Their acquisition, repair, financing, and continued use are central to the practice.
The Stony Island Arts Bank required a substantial fundraising effort. Gates helped finance the restoration by selling marble fragments from the building as artworks he called “bank bonds,” turning material salvaged from the project into a source of capital for its reconstruction. The rehabilitation ultimately involved millions of dollars in investment, far beyond the symbolic $1 purchase price.
His work has also moved beyond individual cultural buildings.
At the Dorchester Art + Housing Collaborative, Gates and Rebuild Foundation partnered with Brinshore Development, the Chicago Housing Authority, and architects Landon Bone Baker to rehabilitate the former Dante Harper public housing development. Completed in 2014, the project restored 32 townhomes and created an on-site arts center, bringing affordable housing and cultural programming together within an existing residential community.
More recently, Gates and Rebuild completed another major rehabilitation: The Land School, a former Catholic elementary school at 72nd Street and Dorchester Avenue. The 40,000-square-foot building had closed in 2002 and remained unused for more than a decade. After acquiring it in 2014, Rebuild undertook a seven-year, $12 million reconstruction that preserved its historic masonry, plasterwork, and decorative brick. The first phase opened in September 2025 as a space for artists, archives, education, and creative experimentation.
These projects are not interchangeable. A former bank becomes an archive and cultural center. Vacant public housing becomes homes and an arts community. An abandoned school becomes a place for learning and creative work. Each requires a different combination of design, construction, financing, partnerships, and long-term stewardship.
Gates has also used the work itself to create opportunities for others. Through Dorchester Industries, Rebuild has supported training in crafts such as woodworking and milling, including the reuse of ash trees removed from Chicago streets. The material and labor involved in rebuilding become part of the larger effort to develop local skills and capacity.
His projects demonstrate that preservation can be more than protecting a building from demolition. It can create a new institution, return housing to use, preserve cultural memory, and give a neighborhood physical places in which to shape its own future.
The work is slow, expensive, and dependent on sustained investment. But the result is tangible: buildings that were once empty are occupied again, serving purposes that did not exist when they were first constructed.
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