The Pickard China factory in Antioch, Illinois, about 50 miles northwest of Chicago, is a cavernous space full of hulking, noisy, clay-splattered machines. The decorating room smells strongly of turpentine. The company's team of gilders mixes the chemical in with the pigments they use to handpaint plates, cups and other high-end porcelain homewares.
"I don't even notice the smell," said employee Rachael Keeling, while deftly applying a narrow green band to a spinning porcelain plate destined for a golf club awards ceremony. "How crazy is that?"
Keeling is among a small group of British craftspeople employed at Pickard. She said she came to the U.S. to work for the company 25 years ago from the famed Wedgwood factory in Stoke-on-Trent when fine china production in her home country started becoming more automated and moving overseas. Keeling said she's still worried about her future. "I came here and it's like, 'Oh, is it going to happen again?'"
A long decline
There used to be a handful of companies manufacturing high-end china in the U.S. Pickard is the last one left.
Its customers include the White House, U.S. embassies, fancy hotels, private jets, golf clubs, and higher-end retailers like Williams-Sonoma. "It's a beautiful, beautiful service," said Michelle Obama's interior designer, Michael Smith, of the blue-green rimmed dinnerware set he and the former First Lady commissioned from Pickard during her husband's second term in office. "It also lends itself to being used in convenient, flexible, and practical way."
But despite its prestigious clientele, the company and the fine china industry as a whole have been facing a long decline. Pickard's sprawling factory is in urgent need of repairs and upgrades, and its current output is roughly a quarter of what it was at the company's peak in the 1970s.
"There's a kind of cultural cliff that things have fallen off in terms of this sort of commodity," said Philip Scranton, an emeritus historian of American industrial development at Rutgers University. Scranton said escalating manufacturing costs and the spread of casual lifestyles since the 1970s caused nearly all of the American china factories to go bust or move operations overseas. "And I am not sure whether there's a way of recovering that market."
Scranton put Pickard's survival down to "stubbornness and legacy." Launched in 1893 by pottery salesman Wilder Pickard, it was run by the Pickard family throughout its history. And then Theaster Gates showed up.
Art world titan
"The idea that Pickard could be a place bringing artisanal manufacturing back to the fore – that's very exciting," Gates said on a visit to the Pickard factory in early September, his seventh or eighth in recent months.
On this particular day, Gates and Andy Pickard Morgan, the fourth-generation family member in charge of the company since 2006, had just informed Pickard's 12 full-time staff members of the artist's acquisition of the business for an undisclosed sum.
"I'm still digesting everything," said David Nosko, a member of Pickard's pottery operations team, not long after hearing the news. "We've seen Theaster come through a few times and I always liked his energy."
Gates, though soft-spoken and bespectacled, is a contemporary art world titan whose name often shows up on the industry's most influential lists. His installations, made out of salvaged materials, sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars and appear in major museums. Gates has a long-term partnership with Prada, creating exhibitions and serving on the brand's diversity council. He's a professor at the University of Chicago. And he moves in high-powered circles, counting The Obamas and Illinois first lady MK Pritzker among his friends.
When Gates needed a manufacturer for a homewares project he was working on with Prada earlier this year, it was Pritzker who put Gates in touch with Pickard. "I said, 'Well, Pickard — it's got to be Pickard,'" Pritzker said. "'It's the only one made in America. Let me just hook you guys up.'"
The conversation quickly evolved when Pickard Morgan told Gates he was within a few years of retiring, and no one in the Pickard family wanted to take on overseeing the factory's rapidly aging infrastructure and managing a highly-skilled workforce who would find it difficult to secure another job in their field. So he asked the artist if he'd be interested in buying the business.
"What meant the most to me was finding someone like Theaster," Pickard Morgan said. "And not some turnaround company that was going to come in and lay people off and try to sell Pickard a year and a half later for a profit." (Pickard's main competitor, Lenox, was sold to a private investment firm in 2020 and moved production to Asia and Europe.)
An unlikely, yet canny match
The match between a hip contemporary artist and an old-fashioned porcelain business might seem strange. But the 53-year-old Gates's vision of what an artist is and does is expansive.
"I'm interested in the most outer limits of what we might consider art," he said.
Gates himself is a master ceramicist who focuses on Japanese and African-American traditions and has worked to highlight little-known Black potters. He recently mounted a show at the prestigious Gagosian Gallery in New York about the 19th century enslaved ceramicist David Drake.
Also relevant is Gates' long track record of restoring and repurposing defunct buildings, archives and businesses, mainly on Chicago's South Side.
"If I just sold it to someone, they could have just run it down," said Ken Mehta, the former owner of a neighborhood hardware store which Gates' purchased in 2014 when Mehta was looking to retire. The artist then transformed the space and its massive inventory into an art installation and events space. "Theaster, he put his heart in it, and that brings a lot of value to the neighborhood."
Gates also created a cultural center out of the renovated premises of a condemned bank building, which he bought from the City of Chicago for $1 in 2013. The Stony Island Arts Bank now holds thousands of books relating to Black history and culture from Johnson Publishing, the company behind the trailblazing Black lifestyle magazines Ebony and Jet.
"He's someone who has a deep and profound respect for building upon legacy and preserving legacy," Linda Johnson Rice, Johnson Publishing's chairman and CEO.
Johnson Rice said that's why the artist's purchase of Pickard China makes sense. But she also said breathing new creative life into dormant commercial assets is not the same thing as running an existing company.
"These businesses and archives are, for lack of a better word, static. And this business that he's just acquired is an ongoing business," Johnson Rice said. "Welcome to the real world of business, Theaster!"
A daunting assignment
The new president of Pickard China certainly has a lot to contend with.
Gates said the factory needs a new roof and HVAC system, among other urgent repairs. His priorities include building a team to manage the daily operations, while he guides the company's creative strategy. Pickard Morgan said he plans to stay on in an executive role.
Gates said he's not fazed by the magnitude of the task ahead.
"All of the parts that would scare you – like, it's a big building, it's 60,000 square feet, a staff that I would inherit – for some reason, all of those things become a little bit poetic," Gates said. "Not only do I get to add to the legacy, it's giving me new ideas for what the future of my artistic practice will be."
This includes expanding his work in ceramics to include porcelain. After all, he did just buy a china factory.
Jennifer Vanasco edited the audio and digital versions of this story, with an assist from Clare Lombard. Chloee Weiner mixed the audio. Danielle Scruggs is the photo editor.
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