About Rebuild Foundation
Rebuild Foundation is a platform for art, cultural development, and neighborhood transformation. Our projects support artists and strengthen communities by providing free arts programming and creating new cultural amenities. Rebuild’s mission is to make art accessible by demonstrating the impact of innovative, ambitious, and entrepreneurial arts and cultural initiatives. The work is informed by three core values: black people matter, black spaces matter, and black things matter. Rebuild leverages the power and potential of communities, buildings, and objects that others have written off. Founded and led by artist Theaster Gates, Rebuild Foundation extends the social engagement of Gates’ studio practice to the South Side of Chicago and beyond.
The Stony Island Arts Bank is a hybrid gallery, media archive, library, and art center in the Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. Designed by William Gibbons Uffendell and built in 1923, the bank at 68th Street and Stony Island Avenue was once a vibrant community savings and loan bank. By the eighties, the branch had closed, and the building remained vacant and deteriorating for decades. Reopened and radically restored in October 2015 by artist Theaster Gates, the building now serves as a space for creatives and neighborhood residents to preserve, access, reimagine and share their heritage – and a destination for artists, scholars, curators, and collectors to research and engage with world-class art and South Side history.
The Arts Bank houses four major collections:
- the Johnson Publishing Archive, a collection of more than 15,000 books, periodicals, furnishings and ephemera donated by the Johnson Publishing Company, publisher of the seminal Ebony and Jet magazines;
- the University of Chicago Glass Lantern Slides, over 60,000 slides of art and architectural history from the Paleolithic to Modern eras;
- the Edward J. Williams Collection, over 4,000 objects of “negrobilia,” mass cultural objects and artifacts that feature stereotypical images of black people; and
- Frankie Knuckles Collection, the personal vinyl collection of the godfather of house music.
KICKBACK serves as part of Rebuild Foundation’s year-long initiative to raise awareness and provide resources and sanctuary for marginalized communities impacted by the HIV/AIDS crisis, made possible by funding that Rebuild received from the 2018 (RED) Auction.
