‘It’s my job to wake things up,’ the artist told The Guardian as he was opening a solo show at White Cube London in February. He went on to explain how he saw his role as that of an interpreter between political and aesthetic values. The London show, 1965: Malcolm in Winter: A Translation Exercise, came out of his retrospective in Tokyo last year, where he met a Japanese collector of twentieth-century Black-American political paraphernalia, bought the archive and has now responded to it with iterations of his ‘Tar Paintings’ featuring iconography of the civil rights era. Newly minted as a Guggenheim Fellow, Gates had further solo shows this year in Sintra, Portugal, and Halifax, Canada, as well as two back home in Chicago. In September, on the South Side of the Windy City, where for 15 years the artist has developed his art-led regeneration programme via the non-profit Rebuild Foundation, Gates opened the Land School, a ‘radical model of land stewardship’ with an emphasis on place-based practice, offering coworking space, recording studios, workshop space and home to several community groups.