Theaster Gates Bets on Fine China, Buys Pickard
Chicago artist Theaster Gates has acquired Pickard China, the last remaining manufacturer of fine china in the United States, in a deal that marries his celebrated ceramics practice with a 130-year-old American industrial legacy. The sale, announced to the company’s 12 full-time employees in early September 2026, was arranged through Illinois First Lady MK Pritzker, a friend of Gates. The purchase price was not disclosed.
According to NPR, which first reported the acquisition, the 53-year-old artist and master ceramicist plans to preserve and reimagine the Antioch, Illinois-based company even as its sprawling 60,000-square-foot factory stands in urgent need of repairs, including a new roof and HVAC system.
An Unlikely Match Made Through an Introduction
The path to the deal began not with a business plan but with a homewares project. Early in 2026, Gates needed a manufacturer for a collaboration with the fashion house Prada. MK Pritzker, the wife of Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, made the connection.
“I said, ‘Well, Pickard - it’s got to be Pickard.’ It’s the only one made in America. Let me just hook you guys up,” Pritzker recalled, according to NPR.
That introduction landed as Pickard’s fourth-generation steward, Andy Pickard Morgan, was contemplating retirement. No member of the Pickard family wanted to take over the company, and Morgan initiated conversations about a sale. He said he was determined to find a buyer who would not simply strip the business for parts.
“What meant the most to me was finding someone like Theaster,” Morgan told NPR. “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.”
Morgan plans to remain in an executive role at the company.
A Legacy of American Craft
Founded in 1893 by pottery salesman Wilder Pickard in Edgerton, Wisconsin, the company moved to Chicago at the turn of the 20th century, where it specialized in hand-painted art pieces and dessert and tea sets, according to the company’s official history. Its early artists were immigrants and painters from the Art Institute of Chicago who developed a distinctly American style of hand-painted china.
The company’s present home dates to the tenure of Wilder’s son, Austin Pickard, who moved Pickard to its current Antioch, Illinois location in 1930. Seven years later, in 1937, the company introduced the warm white china body bearing the “Lion” trademark it still uses today.
Pickard’s prestige grew through its government commissions. It has produced the official U.S. Department of State china service, used in American embassies and consulates worldwide, for roughly four decades, and it has been selected by first ladies - including Laura Bush and Michelle Obama - to produce official White House china services. Its roster has also included Air Force One, Camp David, Blair House, the United Nations, and Gracie Mansion, as well as luxury hotels, private jets, and retailers such as Williams-Sonoma.
The company’s output today, however, is roughly a quarter of what it was during its 1970s peak. Its main competitor, Lenox, was sold to a private investment firm in 2020 and later moved production overseas; its Kinston, North Carolina factory closed the same year.
“There’s a kind of cultural cliff that things have fallen off in terms of this sort of commodity,” Philip Scranton, an emeritus historian of American industrial development at Rutgers University, told NPR. “And I am not sure whether there’s a way of recovering that market.”
Scranton attributed Pickard’s survival to “stubbornness and legacy.”
Gates’ Pattern of Preservation
The Pickard purchase fits a template Gates has refined over more than a decade on Chicago’s South Side. In 2013, he bought a condemned bank building from the City of Chicago for one dollar and turned it into the Stony Island Arts Bank, which now houses the archives of Johnson Publishing, the former publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines. In 2014, he purchased a retiring neighbor’s hardware store and transformed it into an art installation and events space.
“He’s someone who has a deep and profound respect for building upon legacy and preserving legacy,” Linda Johnson Rice, chairman and CEO of Johnson Publishing, told NPR.
But Johnson Rice also offered a gentle caution about the difference between curating history and operating a living company.
“These businesses and archives are, for lack of a better word, static,” she said. “And this business that he’s just acquired is an ongoing business. Welcome to the real world of business, Theaster!”
The Artistic Dimension
Gates, whose salvaged-material installations command high prices and appear in major museums, has long worked in clay. He is a master ceramicist focused on Japanese and African-American traditions and has highlighted little-known Black potters, including in a recent Gagosian Gallery exhibition devoted to the 19th-century enslaved ceramicist David Drake.
Pickard, he suggested, expands the material vocabulary of his practice into porcelain.
“I’m interested in the most outer limits of what we might consider art,” Gates told NPR. “The idea that Pickard could be a place bringing artisanal manufacturing back to the fore - that’s very exciting.”
For Pickard’s workforce, the reaction has been cautiously hopeful. Rachael Keeling, a gilder who came to the company from the Wedgwood factory in Stoke-on-Trent, England, about 25 years ago, has watched British china jobs migrate overseas.
What’s Next
The acquisition raises as many questions as it answers. Gates has not detailed his plans for the factory’s needed repairs, nor how he intends to grow Pickard’s sales in a market that has contracted for decades. Much will depend on whether an artist known for reinventing neglected institutions can translate that instinct into a competitive manufacturing business.
What is clear is that the last American fine china maker will not go the way of its competitors - at least not under its new owner. Whether Gates can turn a cultural rescue into a commercial revival is a question the next several years will answer.