Theaster Gates, The Black Monks of Mississippi

Black Madonna is the four-track EP with which Theaster Gates and his collective The Black Monks of Mississippi launched Black Madonna Press, the label the Chicago artist runs with The Vinyl Factory. It first appeared in 2018 alongside Black Madonna, his exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel, which opened on 12 June and ran until 21 October across the museum's Neubau and Gegenwart buildings. The show examined the cult of the Black Madonna and her political and metaphorical charge. At its centre were 13,000 images from the archive of the Johnson Publishing Company, publisher of Ebony and Jet, which Gates took out of their magazine context. He also turned two floors of the museum into a temporary sound studio and printing workshop, so that music and print were produced inside the exhibition while it was open.

During the first week the Black Monks played every night in the galleries with the local group Jazzcampus Basel. The Vinyl Factory's mobile lathe, installed on site, cut those sessions direct to vinyl. The line-up announced for Basel was Yaw Agyeman, Mikel Avery, Justin Dillard, Ben Lamar Gay and Kiara Lanier. The group draws on Chicago players and often adds local musicians wherever it performs. The EP has two pieces on each side: I Need You and Soul Train, then Brother From Another Planet and Opus For Flute. When the label first presented Brother From Another Planet, it pointed to the track's improvised synthesizers and their debt to Sun Ra. The group dates back to 2008, when an invitation from the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven led Gates to ask what sound could stand for Black presence in the world. Gates, who directed a church choir as a teenager, calls himself the group's abbot and his own role "a kind of abstract gospelist" (The Vinyl Factory, 2020). The Monks rarely play music venues. Gates explains that they research the objects, collections and history of the museum that hosts them, and that this research becomes material for improvisation.

This is the 2024 repress of the standard edition, limited to 500 copies on 180-gram black vinyl in a sleeve with artwork by Gates.