“I always find myself returning to the vessel,” says the wide-ranging artist and conservator Theaster Gates. “It is part of the intellectual life force of my practice and it precedes all other forms of making.” Gates trained as a potter, and in the simple hollow container known as a vessel he sees the universal and ceremonial. He also sees metaphor—an object holding symbolic and spiritual elements that can characterize a collective experience. In this exhibition, in classic Gates fashion, black bricks and glazed clay bridge tradition and modernism, as well as Eastern, Western, and African cultures. —E.C.