Gates’s father, named Theaster as well, tarred roofs for a living, and Gates likes to say that laboring with his dad taught him how to work with his hands. But he may also have picked up his business acumen from his father, who operated a barbecue pit on weekends and owned a four-unit rental property. At Iowa State University, Gates took several ceramics classes. His professor, Ingrid Lilligren — his only formal art teacher — remembers Gates actually jumping up and down with joy whenever he was in the studio. But he majored in urban planning. Gates believes the “cross-training” has helped expand his thinking about what art is. He also was following his mother’s rules. If not a pastor, she wanted him to be a pharmacist, but when Gates switched majors from pre-pharmacy, that, too, conformed to her thinking: His cousin Larry had studied urban planning and landed a good city job. And that’s what Gates did. In 2000, he began work at the Chicago Transit Authority as an arts planner. He proved to be an effective bureaucrat, something he also considers vital. “Understanding how bureaucratic systems work and even how to invent and tweak them is a very big part of my practice. I’m not a good perspective drawer, but I can write a really good memo.”

In 2006, the University of Chicago hired Gates as an arts programmer. By that time, he’d earned a master’s degree in fine arts and religious studies from the University of Cape Town, and he’d returned to Iowa State for an interdisciplinary master’s — combining community and regional planning, ceramics and religion. Gates wanted to live close to work, and he also often pondered the dilapidation and crime in the black neighborhoods beyond the university’s borders. For decades the number of poor people living in these communities had held steady, while black working- and middle-class families fled by the tens of thousands. What would it mean if he settled there? If he, in effect, stayed? So for $130,000 he bought a former candy store on South Dorchester. When the vacant house beside it went on the market for $16,000, he borrowed from friends and a former boss to purchase that too. Gates didn’t have a plan; initially he merely wanted to make the properties beautiful.

Six years ago, when he could barely afford his car and house payments, Gates self-financed his first solo art exhibition, holding it at a local community-arts center. Centered on a series of soul-food dinners that he served with the exacting rituals of a Japanese tea ceremony, the show also involved an elaborate ruse about a Japanese potter Gates invented; he even hired an actor to portray the fictional sculptor’s son. At that stage in his career, Gates says, he felt the need to construct a fake potter to cope with his own marginality as an artist. But in 2009, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago picked him for its emerging-artists show, and a year later he was given the sculpture court at the Whitney Biennial. In the courtyard, Gates placed thronelike shoeshine stands and stacked shelving of wood pulled from an old Wrigley’s chewing-gum factory in Chicago; his musical troupe, the Black Monks of Mississippi, performed at the museum. Around that time he also began working with decommissioned fire hoses from the 1960s. He coiled them like bull’s-eyes inside glass vitrines and frames of wood taken from his Dorchester houses (the Brooklyn Museum of Art owns one, titled “In the Event of Race Riot II . . .”) or cutting them into strips and laying the material with its faded hues side by side, like an illusive stripe painting (the Whitney is in the process of acquiring one of these). His first major show, at Chicago’s Kavi Gupta Gallery, included the fire hoses and other formal objects extracted from the demolitions and rebuilds on Dorchester. Everything sold.

Gates used the earnings to continue to restore one of the Dorchester buildings. Remarkably, he managed to fashion a kind of circular economy whereby his urban interventions were being financed by the sale of artworks created from the materials salvaged from the interventions. Kavi Gupta, whose gallery continues to represent Gates, brought some of the city’s wealthiest art collectors to Dorchester, where they fell under Gates’s spell. Not only did they buy his work, but they also asked how their foundations could support his larger enterprise. Well, Gates told them, this building does need a new heating-and-cooling system. Gupta says a check was written, the HVAC purchased soon thereafter.

Image Gates performing “12 Ballads for Huguenot House” in Kassel, Germany, in 2012. Credit... Kavi Gupta, Chicago

Gates now owns 12 properties in the vicinity of his home. Rebuild Foundation, the nonprofit he created to run Dorchester Projects, teaches video production at the nearby middle school and sewing and design for local kids. It has begun work in Omaha and St. Louis as well, transforming properties there into community-art spaces. Gates is still full time at the University of Chicago, currently as the director of Arts and Public Life, heading an arts incubator that the university opened this year in the poor black neighborhood outside its traditional western boundary. Additionally, Gates’s nonprofit and a private development company are turning a shuttered public-housing project near Dorchester Projects into a 32-unit mixed-income complex. Starting next year, it will become home both to low-income families and to emerging artists who will do the programming at its on-site art center. Richard Sciortino, one of the development company’s owners, believes that this concept of the public-housing artist colony is something that can work elsewhere, and he and Gates are already looking into converting a couple of other housing projects on the East Coast.

If all this weren’t enough, Gates is also creating two works of art for a renovated Chicago Transit Authority train station on the South Side. For the bricks he hopes to use in his $1.3 million project, Gates plans to build an actual brick factory next to his studio. He says he will then bid on other brick contracts and also have this “most useful modular material” on hand for other artworks. Moreover, “the making of the bricks will off-heat, and that heat will be used to dry ash trees I get from the Chicago Park District,” he explained. “And we will have a full milling operation. And then the sawdust from the ash trees, we will turn that into a wooden pellet, like a fuel, and then that will feed my wood-fire kiln that makes pots.”