Theaster Gates has been named the inaugural director of the Arts and Public Life initiative at the University of Chicago:

Gates will work to realize the initiative's major goals: advancing artistic ambition through a program of artist residencies, amplifying cultural assets by promoting interactions between artists and cultural institutions on the South Side and the University's faculty and students, and inspiring creativity in youth through apprenticeship programs and enhanced K-12 arts education efforts.

"Arts and Public Life is a way of framing how we imagine our relationship with our neighbors," Gates said. "It also gives us a chance to hone in on ways that the University's friendship to the South Side could be extended, and think about how the facilities at the University and the vast artistic knowledge that surrounds this place could act as platforms by which other emerging artists in the city could benefit."

These issues of community, hospitality, and arts have been central to Gates's work as an artist as well as an arts administrator, and will take on another public, participatory form in his Soul Food Pavilion project for Feast.