This weekend the latest Nasher Sculpture Prize will be awarded to Theaster Gates in a Saturday evening gala.

But before any of that happens, there will be a public symposium on his works, a conversation with the jurors and a public ‘town hall’ dialogue with the artist himself. Gates is known for his community-driven artworks — he’s as interested in urban planning and racial inequities as he is in the media he uses in his sculptures and installations and constructions. So the public forums are a natural for him and his work.

But this has been the impulse behind the prize since the beginning – as the video by filmmaker Quin Mathews above attests: to stimulate conversation internationally about not just the particular prize-winner but sculpture in general: its purposes, its meanings, its future.