The Serpentine Gallery’s annual summer pavilion will take a spiritual turn this year, in the form of a cylindrical Black Chapel, designed by Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates. Taking inspiration from the kilns of Stoke-on-Trent, the wooden structure will rise up to a great domed roof, punctured by a central oculus, illuminating a circular space for reflection and musical performances.
“Coming out of Covid, I thought how nice it would be to have a place of quietude,” said Gates. “It’s a place for people to be with their thoughts and rest, a sacred chapel where you can sit and be reflective. It should give you the ability to touch your inside self.”
The pop-up Pantheon, which has been designed with the help of Adjaye Associates, will feature a large bronze bell at its entrance, salvaged from the St Laurence church on Chicago’s South Side, which was demolished in 2014. It will be used to signal concerts and events in a wide-ranging programme, including a planned performance by Gates and his band, the Black Monks.
“I want it to be a chapel for new music,” said Gates. “Gospel, alt-jazz, avant garde sounds, the history of British black music, Gregorian and Benedictine chants – all the things me and my band are into.” The programme is still to be confirmed, but Gates said he is speaking to Corinne Bailey Rae, the Otolith Group and Phoebe Collings-James, and wants to invite “vocal ensembles and the great choirs of London”. He hopes to record in the space, too, and produce vinyl records with his label, Black Madonna Press, a sub-label of the Vinyl Factory.
Although artists have collaborated on the London gallery’s pavilions in the past – including Olafur Eliasson with architect Kjetil Thorsen in 2007, and Ai Weiwei with Herzog & de Meuron in 2012 – this is the first time that an artist has been given top billing (David Adjaye’s firm is credited with “architectural support”). The selection of Gates was delayed by a year, so that it could coincide with his wider multi-venue project in London, The Question of Clay, which has seen his work exhibited across the V&A, Whitechapel Gallery and White Cube, exploring the history, craft and racial politics of ceramics.
“I always wanted to capstone the clay project with this vessel-like structure that would allow great things to happen,” said Gates. He had planned to build the pavilion from bricks, echoing his 2017 project for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Black Vessel for a Saint, but it proved too expensive and environmentally unfriendly for the temporary structure. Instead, the pavilion will be made from a frame of slender timber and steel trusses, which will form a circle of columns, supporting the 16-metre diameter roof, with further trusses radiating from the 11-metre-high oculus, like the spokes of a bicycle wheel. Images give the impression of an industrial space, like being inside a miniature gasometer.
The frame will be clad with plywood and covered with a waterproof membrane – lending it a similar finish to Peter Zumthor’s enigmatic 2011 pavilion – while the lower levels will be lined with black-stained timber boarding, inside and out, visually anchoring the structure to the ground. Shallow ramps will lead in and out of two doorways, placed off-centre, while a large freestanding wall inside will separate a cafe area from the space for reflection and performance. The three-metre oculus, meanwhile, will be open to the elements.
“It will be a feature when it rains!” said Gates. “That’s just part of the beauty. I love that idea that nature will come in. And we’ve got great drainage!”
He says the title of the pavilion, Black Chapel, acknowledges the role that sacred music and the sacred arts have had on his practice. It is also a nod to a project with the same name he produced in 2019 for the Haus der Kunst in Munich, commissioned by the late curator Okwui Enwezor, who also invited him to participate in the 2015 Venice Biennale.
“I first took the St Laurence bell to Venice,” he said, “so now I’m going to bring it to London to honour Okwui, and all these great people in my life who have encouraged the relationship between art, architecture and the sacred.”
The artist is no stranger to architecture, having restored and converted several vacant buildings into cultural institutions with archival collections on the South Side of Chicago. He is now part of a team working on the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, with Adjaye and Asif Kahn, and he has an advisory role on the Barack Obama Presidential Center, also planned for Chicago’s South Side.
“As artists, we’re novices to architecture,” he said. “So we can sometimes make suggestions that are slightly different. I’ve been looking at the way African Americans hijacked modernism, and added old colour and old patterns to create this kind of hybrid design philosophy.”
He sees the Serpentine Pavilion as the start of a new architectural enquiry. “I feel like it’s really the beginning of my investigation into spherical structures,” he said. “I’m moving from smaller vessels to bigger and bigger vessels.”
Serpentine Pavilion: Black Chapel is at the Serpentine Gallery, London, from 10 June to 16 October.
