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The art practice most akin to what Gates is doing, and to which he often refers, is Project Row Houses. In 1993, Rick Lowe and several other African-American artists renovated a string of abandoned shotgun-style homes in Houston’s Third Ward, turning them into artist residences, setting up community-arts programming and later opening transitional housing for single mothers. They based the enterprise on the German artist Joseph Beuys’s concept of social sculpture, the idea that a work of art could be a practical social action

Gates believes the “cross-training” has helped expand his thinking about what art is.

There are the teenagers on the block paid to clean up, the ex-con who began as a denailer of salvaged wood, Gates’s nephew apprenticing at the workshop. Rebuild Foundation, Gates’s studio and the University of Chicago Arts Incubator together have a full-time staff of 20 — most of them in their own right artists, curators, art historians — and those people manage others.