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"While King was having a dream, the rest of us Negroes are having a nightmare. While King is talking about 'I have a dream,' our people are being bitten by dogs, beaten with clubs, shot down, and lynched… You don’t need a dream when you’re already in hell."
— Malcolm X
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The above text originates from Malcolm X’s seminal speech "The Ballot or the Bullet" delivered on April 3, 1964, wherein he starkly contrasts Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent dreamscape with the visceral reality of systemic violence. His call for direct action in the Black liberation movement culminated in his assassination by Nation of Islam operatives on February 21, 1965.
In 2025, Captain America: Brave New World premiered as the franchise’s lowest-rated installment. While continuing its trademark political thriller tropes, the film transitioned its protagonist from the white superhero Steve Rogers to Sam Wilson (the Falcon), Marvel’s first Black Captain America.
As a superhero archetype embedded in subcultural mythology, this symbol operates as a projective screen for modern identity politics. For American audiences, it embodies a paradoxical entanglement of ideological consumption and production: spectators are simultaneously disciplined subjects and active agents in meaning-making. The film attempts to frame the new Captain America as an allegory for the existential quandaries of Black heroism, whether as soldiers or patriots draped in the Stars and Stripes. Yet this blunt interrogation of racial identity politics faced critical apathy and box-office fatigue, echoing the self-deconstructive admission in its precursor series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier: "They’ll never let a Black man be Captain America." To be coronated as Captain America, the film suggests, is to become a simulacrum estranged from truth: a betrayal of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacies.
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Concurrent with the film’s release, Theaster Gates’ solo exhibition 1965: Malcolm in Winter — A Translation Exercise opened at London’s White Cube in February 2025. Centering on Malcolm X’s centennial and 60th assassination anniversary, Gates reconstructed archival materials from Japanese journalist Ei Nagata and his partner Haruhi Ishitani (witnesses to the assassination) through hybrid practices spanning painting, sculptural installation, architectural intervention, and film. This cross-media project merges biographical archaeology with a transcultural study of Black radicalism refracted through Japanese aesthetics.
Theaster Gates (b. 1973, Chicago) redefines the boundaries of contemporary art through interdisciplinary practices rooted in ethics of social engagement and community empowerment, working across sculpture, ceramics, architecture, music, performance, fashion, and design. His early training in sculpture and urban planning informs his multifaceted perspective on spatial narratives and public discourse. Gates’s artistic practice challenges the notion of Black spaces as fixed cultural forms, recasting them as dynamic sites of struggle; spaces shaped by communal aspirations, artistic agency, and pragmatic cultural-political praxis.
In this exhibition, Gates presents a multidimensional exploration of cultural hybridity. His dialogue with Japanese culture began in 2004 with studies in Tokoname-yaki pottery, and over two decades, he has woven East Asian craft aesthetics into the fabric of the African diaspora’s identity. By merging the Japanese Mingei movement’s ethos of “anonymous craftsmanship” with the emancipatory politics of the Black is Beautiful movement, Gates proposes the theory of Afro-Mingei, a framework that reclaims marginalized aesthetics erased by colonial narratives, manifested in contemporary African artworks infused with wabi-sabi sensibilities.
Malcolm’s Hut (2025)
This semi-open, hermitage-inspired installation performs a paradox: while its architecture invites viewers to enter, White Cube staff—orchestrated by the artist—ritualistically deny access. This simultaneity of welcome and exclusion materializes a spatial matryoshka of power dynamics within the gallery, where institutional authority and artistic intentionality collide.
Gates constructs a passageway framed by West African red ironwood, evoking the torii gates of Japanese shrines. This architectural gesture maps a meditative journey from the profane to the sacred; a liminal space where materiality and spirituality converge.
Libation for Uncertain Times (2024), a large-scale installation, stands as a focal point of this exhibition. Composed of approximately 1,000 traditional Japanese binbo tokkuri (humble sake flasks) from the Edo period, the work emerged from Gates’ collaboration with ceramicist Tani Q. These vessels, unearthed and recontextualized, are now recast under the banner of Gates’ Japanese production company, Mon Industries.
During the opening ceremony, members of Gates’ musical collective The Black Monks activated the libation space, transforming it into a sonic bar where ritual and revelry intertwined. This improvisational performance realised Gates’ vision of a cross-cultural dialogue, a celebration of energy exchange and collective resonance. Formerly known as The Black Monks of Mississippi, the ensemble fuses experimental improvisation with Black Southern musical traditions—blues, gospel, and spirituals—while drawing conceptual parallels to ascetic practices in Eastern monastic traditions. The group has engaged in socially driven projects ranging from the Venice Biennale to urban renewal initiatives in Chicago’s South Side, and interdisciplinary programs bridging art, theology, and African American studies at the University of Chicago.
Theaster Gates integrates his father’s legacy as a roofer into his artistic practice, employing industrial materials as mediums. In his Tar Paintings series, he embeds political symbols, such as civil rights movement imagery and Black Panther Party insignia, transforming waterproofing materials into visual archives of Black resistance. He deliberately juxtaposes vibrantly colored synthetic roofing tiles from American architecture with fragments of Japanese ink-on-paper calligraphy, creating a tension between the rigidity of industrial matter and the fluidity of ink.
Regarding the archive of Ei Nagata and Haruhi Ishitani, Gates draws a central lesson: preservation must coexist with activation. Ishitani’s custodianship of her partner’s legacy transcends mere storage; through cataloging, recontextualizing, and reinterpretation, she revitalizes dormant documents, enabling them to engage contemporary discourse. Gates argues that institutional stewardship, which often removes such materials from public view, locking them in archival vaults for “protection,” risks silencing their radical potential. Instead, he insists on artistic intervention as activism, reinscribing archives into the immediacy of the artistic present to sustain the living pulse of guerrilla histories.
“The question here,” he says gesturing around the gallery, “is how do you translate political values into aesthetic values? I’m not a historian, I’m an artist. It’s my job to wake things up. If I was putting 13 paintings on the wall, it would be a lot more straightforward. But this,” he points at the boxes of archival material, “suits me. The idea is to start to discover these things together.”
—— Interview: Theaster Gates: ‘I’m an artist. It’s my job to wake things up’
Theaster Gates defines "translation" as a methodological framework for artistic creation, through which he intervenes in the processes of archival reproduction. By reorganizing, relocating, and reactivating dormant documentary materials, he constructs dynamic dialogues with history within his exhibitions. The archival assemblage at the heart of this exhibition traces the global repercussions of Malcolm X’s assassination, extending beyond the event’s chronology to reveal, through correspondence and photographs left by Ei Nagata and Haruhi Ishitani, the couple’s intricate engagements with U.S.-based and international socialist groups, as well as Black Power organisations. While some of these connections were directly influenced by Malcolm’s ideology, others evolved into independent political trajectories.
From the underground newspaper The Black Panther Newsletter to the Japanese leftist publication Kaihō (Liberation), the exhibited radical media fragments collectively form a “global history from the streets.” These materials not only document the life trajectories of figures like Stokely Carmichael (co-founder and Prime Minister Emeritus of the Black Panther Party)—arrests, exiles, and all—but also map resonances between 1960s-70s anti-colonial movements in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the U.S. civil rights struggle. A striking example is the Algerian National Liberation Front’s provision of overseas sanctuary to Black Panther members, crystallizing transnational solidarities forged in the fires of liberation.
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Marvel’s 2018 film Black Panther arrived 36 years after the dissolution of the Black Panther Party (1966-1982). Although Marvel’s Black Panther superhero, debuted in July 1966, is widely regarded as historically unrelated to the Black Panther Party founded in Oakland, California that October, the film artfully weaves subtle connections between the two across multiple dimensions.
The narrative opens in 1992 Oakland, the same year California erupted in the infamous Los Angeles Uprising: a violent eruption of racial tensions that resulted in approximately $1 billion in property damage, 63 deaths, and thousands injured.
Within this context, the plotline of King T’Chaka investigating Vibranium theft in Oakland becomes a layered allegory. When T’Chaka discovers his brother N’Jobu plotting an armed rebellion, this familial conflict mirrors ideological fractures within the Civil Rights Movement, specifically, the Black Panther Party’s early stance. N’Jobu’s radicalism directly parallels the Party’s rejection of Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent resistance, instead embracing armed self-defense against police brutality as both tactic and ethos.
The internal schisms of the Black Panther Party are also encoded into the film’s narrative. When Eldridge Cleaver, the Party’s radical leader, went into exile in Algeria in 1969 to establish its International Chapter and pledged solidarity with Palestinian and Vietnamese liberation movements, this vision of a “global anti-imperialist alliance” is transposed onto the character of Erik, a Wakandan exile trained by the CIA and operating in Afghanistan as an American “revolutionary mercenary.” This identity contradiction is deeply ironic: Erik inherits Cleaver’s internationalist vision yet remains marked by the logic of American hegemony. When he ascends the Wakandan throne and orders the global distribution of Vibranium weapons, Marvel effectively reduces Third World liberation movements to a form of techno-military adventurism under the guise of “superhero aid,” thereby erasing the complexity of real-world anti-colonial struggles.
What warrants critical scrutiny is how the film substitutes discussions of the Black Panther Party’s community service legacy, such as their real-world Free Breakfast Programs, educational centres, and community clinics, with Wakanda’s Vibranium techno-miracles. While the Party grounded liberation in grassroots care, the cinematic Wakanda reduces its “aid” to high-tech weapons within subsequent Marvel narratives. This hollowed-out Afrofuturist narrative exposes neoliberalism’s impoverished imagination of resistance: structural transformation is replaced by violent technological export, and systemic critique devolves into visual spectacle. When Erik, the Oakland-raised antagonist, dies witnessing Wakanda’s sunset in the Ancestral Plane, his revolutionary lineage is absorbed into Disney’s consumerist machinery—mirroring how the Black Panther Party’s history is increasingly relegated to nostalgic signifiers in mainstream discourse.
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I was looking at some of this history. And thinking about how assassination had been a way of putting terror into the citizenship. One after another, our leaders were assassinated in front of us. They killed Fred Hampton, Malcolm X, they killed Martin Luther King, they killed Bobby Kennedy. That is a lot of slaughter. So when people then say to me today: ‘The left in America is so weak.’ Well, damn! What we are seeing is how this thing was so effective. These were the people who were saying we could achieve racial unity, we could achieve solidarity. And the regime saw that as a threat and these men were killed.”
—— Interview: Theaster Gates: ‘I’m an artist. It’s my job to wake things up’
In Theaster Gates’ critique, America’s historical misalignment on racial solidarity fundamentally describes the symptom of “unfulfilled promises” in the construction of the modern nation-state. This misalignment is not accidental but rooted in America’s excessive obsession with the “melting pot” narrative: it reduces the complexity of multiethnic coexistence to one-dimensional cultural assimilation, while persistently refusing to confront the structural traumas anchored by racial capitalism through slavery, land dispossession, and systemic violence. Analogous to the recurring roof fissures and political acronyms in Gates’ Tar Paintings series, these are like textured historical traces, cracks sealed by asphalt yet still bleeding, representing the unhealed wounds within America’s imagined national community.
Gates argues that America has missed opportunities for racial solidarity, and the suppression and stagnation accumulated over more than 60 years will finally be released in the future, a solidarity that truly encompasses Black people and all other American ethnic groups. This requires not only the retrieval of the Black civil rights movement’s legacy but also the intersectional sedimentation of Latinx “borderland bodies,” the myth of the Asian American “model minority,” and Indigenous land-rights struggles. The sociological work of America’s nation-building must revisit the remnants of civil rights guerrilla actions, transforming fragmented archives housed in museums into collective actions that align with contemporary communities, rebuilding participatory dialogues, such as Gates’ B.A.R. project, which activates archives as sites of communal empowerment, and his Dorchester Projects, which revitalises the decaying communities of Chicago’s South Side. The time has come to fill the signified of the American Dream.
America has yet to become its idealized self. Its nation-building remains an unfinished project, with historical residues fermenting into cyclical crises that betray the unkept oath of E pluribus unum (“Out of many, one”). The urgent task is to confront the structural fissure of racial contradiction permeating U.S. history, rather than perpetuating ideological delusions that reduce civil rights guerrilla struggles to commodified cultural ephemera. Marvel’s Generations comic series epitomises this evasion: by retrofitting Sam Wilson (Falcon) as a Captain America who time-travels to WWII and postwar civil rights eras—positioning him alongside Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., it deploys chrono-folding narratives that simulate Black historical agency. Yet such strategies, under Marvel’s entertainment logic, merely repackage racial conflict as consumable chrono-spectacles. The narrative of the Black Captain America has never meaningfully engaged in shaping America’s future.
— Generations: Sam Wilson Captain America & Steve Rogers Captain America Vol. 1 (2017)
The birth of a “true America” demands not another star-spangled superhero or antihero of varied complexion, but a decolonial spatial revolution. This necessitates dismantling neoliberalism’s meticulously curated “diversity showcases,” while using interethnic collective memories as bricks to construct the common of the 21st century within abandoned schools, factories, and neighborhoods. When socially engaged art practices like Gates,’ which transcend the interdisciplinary synthesis of humanistic mediums and historical imperatives, ultimately interrogate the right to equal inhabitance “under shared roofs,” we glimpse the most urgent architecture of racial solidarity.
A quarter into the 21st century, we need to reorient our dreams more than ever.
“General, I’m loyal to nothing… except the dream.”
—Captain America’s declaration in Frank Miller’s Daredevil #233 (1986)
Exhibition images © White Cube Bermondsey
Reference source:
Coogler, R. (dir.) (2018) Black Panther. Film. Marvel Studios.
Gates, T. (n.d.) The Black Monks. Available at: https://www.theastergates.com/project-items/the-black-monks (Accessed: 24 May 2024).
Marvel Database (2017) Generations: Sam Wilson Captain America & Steve Rogers Captain America Vol 1 1. Available at: https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Generations:_Sam_Wilson_Captain_America_%26_Steve_Rogers_Captain_America_Vol_1 (Accessed: 24 May 2024).
Miller, F. (1986) Daredevil #233: "Born Again". New York: Marvel Comics.
Mori Art Museum (2023) Theaster Gates: How to Build a House Museum. Available at: https://www.mori.art.museum/en/exhibitions/theastergates/ (Accessed: 24 May 2024).
New Exhibitions (2025) Theaster Gates: 1965: Malcolm in Winter. Available at: https://www.newexhibitions.com/e/65522#:~:text=For%20'1965%3A%20Malcolm%20in%20Winter,lives%20to%20preserving%20Malcolm%20X's (Accessed: 24 May 2024).
Onah, J. (dir.) (2025) Captain America: Brave New World. Film. Marvel Studios.
Adams, T. (2025) ‘Theaster Gates: “I’m an artist – it’s my job to wake things up”’, The Guardian, 25 January. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/jan/25/theaster-gates-1965-malcolm-in-winter-white-cube-bermondsey-interview-im-an-artist-its-my-job-to-wake-things-up-malcolm-x-chicago (Accessed: 24 May 2024).
Spellman, M. (creator) (2021) The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. TV series. Disney+.
Tate (n.d.) Five Things to Know About Theaster Gates. Available at: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/theaster-gates-17216/five-things-know-about-theaster-gates (Accessed: 24 May 2024).
White Cube (2025) Theaster Gates: Bermondsey 2025. Available at: https://www.whitecube.com/gallery-exhibitions/theaster-gates-bermondsey-2025 (Accessed: 24 May 2024).
Wikipedia (2024) Black Panther Party. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Panther_Party (Accessed: 24 May 2024).
X, M. (1965) 'The Ballot or the Bullet', in Breitman, G. (ed.) Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements. New York: Grove Press, pp. 23–44.
