A Study on the Institutionalization of Social Practice Projects in Contemporary Art: Focusing on the Operational Structures of Theaster Gates’s Art Projects

This study examines how social practice art projects become institutionalized through operational structures and how, in that process, publicness and sustainability are configured. While social practice has expanded around participation, publicness, and ethical orientation, domestic discussions have tended to foreground aesthetic or critical evaluation; consequently, comparatively fewer studies have accumulated that analyze, in operational terms, the organizational, resource, and governance conditions that enable long-term continuity. Against this backdrop, the study treats social practice not as the outcome of a single artwork or program but as a practice that is repeated and maintained within institutional and organizational arrangements and operational strategies, and it investigates the mechanism of institutionalization at the level of operation. The cases are three projects by the Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates: Dorchester Art + Housing Collaborative (housing and community regeneration), Stony Island Arts Bank (archive and cultural institution), and Kenwood Gardens (environment and open space). Adopting a qualitative single-case study design with embedded units of analysis, the study applies a shared analytic framework focusing on institutional linkage, organizational structure and governance, the mobilization and management of key operational resources, and the configuration of publicness and accessibility. The findings show that the three projects build conditions for continuity by combining different institutional mediations and operational devices, and that the form of publicness is organized differently according to institutional density and operating logics. The study argues that institutionalization should be understood not as a single success model but as a spectrum of differentiated types shaped by specific conditions, and it proposes a perspective that positions social practice as a core object of analysis in arts management and cultural policy.