There’s a standard script for what happens when a venerable, shrinking American manufacturer comes up for sale. A private investment firm buys it, cuts costs, moves production somewhere cheaper, and sells the brand a few years later. It happened, in fact, to Pickard China’s main competitor: Lenox was sold to a private investment firm in 2020 and moved production to Asia and Europe.

Pickard China went the other way. The company, founded in 1893 by pottery salesman Wilder Pickard and run by the Pickard family ever since, is the last maker of fine china left in the United States. And its new owner, for an undisclosed sum, is Theaster Gates, a 53-year-old Chicago-based contemporary artist whose installations — made from salvaged materials — sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars, who has a long-term partnership with Prada, and who counts the Obamas and Illinois first lady MK Pritzker among his friends. It was Pritzker who introduced Gates to Pickard earlier this year, when he needed a manufacturer for a homewares project with Prada. “I said, ‘Well, Pickard — it’s got to be Pickard,’ “ Pritzker told NPR. “ ‘It’s the only one made in America. Let me just hook you guys up.’ “

What Gates bought is not obviously a growth business. The factory in Antioch, Illinois, about 50 miles northwest of Chicago, is a cavernous space of hulking, noisy, clay-splattered machines, in urgent need of repairs and upgrades. Output is roughly a quarter of what it was at the company’s peak in the 1970s. The workforce is 12 full-time staff, highly skilled people who would find it difficult to secure another job in their field. There used to be a handful of companies making high-end china in America, NPR reports; escalating manufacturing costs and the spread of casual lifestyles since the 1970s killed off the rest. Philip Scranton, an emeritus historian of American industrial development at Rutgers, calls it “a kind of cultural cliff that things have fallen off in terms of this sort of commodity,” and attributes Pickard’s survival to “stubbornness and legacy.” “And I am not sure whether there’s a way of recovering that market,” he added.

And yet: the customer list. Pickard makes dinnerware for 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 set he and the former first lady commissioned during her husband’s second term. “It also lends itself to being used in convenient, flexible, and practical way.” There is a market, apparently, for American-made porcelain that the President eats off. It’s just a small one staffed by artisans like Rachael Keeling, who came from the Wedgwood factory in Stoke-on-Trent 25 years ago, when fine china production in Britain started becoming automated and moving overseas, and who told NPR she’s still worried: “I came here and it’s like, ‘Oh, is it going to happen again?’ “

The deal happened because Andy Pickard Morgan, the fourth-generation family member running the company since 2006, is within a few years of retiring, nobody else in the Pickard family wanted the factory’s aging infrastructure, and he knew exactly what the alternative buyer looked like. “What meant the most to me was finding someone like Theaster,” he 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.”

The strange thing is that Gates might be the most qualified buyer in America for this specific company, and not just because he’s a master ceramicist working in Japanese and African-American traditions who recently mounted a Gagosian show about David Drake, the 19th-century enslaved ceramicist. His actual day job, arguably, is buying things the market has given up on and infusing them with value. He bought a neighborhood hardware store on Chicago’s South Side in 2014 when its owner, Ken Mehta, wanted to retire, and turned the space and its massive inventory into an art installation and events space. “If I just sold it to someone, they could have just run it down,” Mehta said. “Theaster, he put his heart in it, and that brings a lot of value to the neighborhood.” Before that, Gates bought a condemned bank building from the City of Chicago for $1 in 2013 and made it the Stony Island Arts Bank, which now holds thousands of books on Black history and culture from Johnson Publishing, the company behind Ebony and Jet.

Running it is the hard part

Still, even people rooting for the deal see the catch. Linda Johnson Rice, Johnson Publishing’s chairman and CEO, said Gates has “a deep and profound respect for building upon legacy and preserving legacy,” and that the Pickard purchase makes sense to her. But, she added, breathing new creative life into dormant commercial assets is not the same thing as running an existing company. That is exactly right, and it is the whole game. The hardware store and the bank were finished as businesses; Gates was buying buildings and inventory. Pickard is alive — 12 employees, live orders, a decorating room that smells strongly of turpentine, payroll due every two weeks. Gates says he’s up for it: “I’m interested in the most outer limits of what we might consider art.” The idea that Pickard could bring artisanal manufacturing back to the fore, he said, is “very exciting.”

Staff sound cautiously game. “I’m still digesting everything,” said David Nosko of the pottery operations team after the announcement. “We’ve seen Theaster come through a few times and I always liked his energy.” Which is about the most honest thing anyone has ever said about a new owner. Energy is nice. The china business, as three generations of Pickards could tell you, runs on stubbornness.