LONDON — The Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates accepted the 40,000-pound Artes Mundi prize on Thursday night in Cardiff, Wales, offering up an expletive as he announced that he would share the winnings with the nine other nominees.
Mr. Gates’s artwork includes installations and happenings staged in large part on Chicago’s poor south side. For several projects he revamped properties on the South Side of Chicago, hosting art events intended to attract both the area’s underserved communities and members of the neighboring University of Chicago community.
He won the Mundi prize, worth about $60,000, for an installation piece titled “A Complicated Relationship between Heaven and Earth, or When We Believe,” which is now on view at the National Museum in Cardiff. The piece, which aims to compare Christianity with other world traditions, includes artifacts used in several non-Western religious traditions and video of the artist’s spiritual music group, the Black Monks of Mississippi.
The Artes Mundi prize has been awarded biennially since 2004. Past recipients include Teresa Margolles, Yael Bartana, N.S. Harsha, Eija-Liisa Ahtila and Xu Bing. The award is run by an independent but government-supported organization, and aims to position itself as a competitor to Britain’s most renowned art prize, the Turner Prize, which is only awarded to British artists. The Turner comes with a cash award of £25,000.
Mr. Gates said that he intended to share the prize money with the other nominees: Carlos Bunga, Omer Fast, Sanja Ivekovic, Ragnar Kjartansson, Sharon Lockhart, Renata Lucas, Renzo Marten, and Karen Mirza with Brad Butler.