Theaster Gates

​​Rebuild Foundation, the non-profit organization founded by artist Theaster Gates, will present an exhibition featuring a suite of new works both inspired by and sourced from the Johnson Publishing Company (JPC) archive. Exhibited alongside Gates’s “Facsimile Cabinet of Women’s Origin Stories,” an ambitious photographic and archival installation comprising over 3,000 framed images of women drawn from the JPC photographic archive, this will be the first time the work is shown in its entirety in the United States, and notably, the first time the work is shown in Chicago, the former home and headquarters of Johnson Publishing Company. 

“Disrupting the notion that archives are objects frozen in time, dependent on academics to interpret, this exhibition brings to the forefront the idea of contemporary art as a new vector for understanding these rich histories and artists as the best messengers for the reactivation of old stories,” Gates said. “By presenting a uniquely Chicago history in this way, I hope to invite the viewer to rethink the centrality of archives in their own lives and the world around them.” 

Founded in Chicago in 1942 by John H. Johnson, the Johnson Publishing Company chronicled the lives of Black Americans for over seven decades, most prominently through the monthly magazine Ebony and its weekly sister outlet Jet, whose publications were initiated in 1945 and 1951, respectively. Along with coverage of important national events and historical milestones, such as the 1963 March on Washington, these publications also emphasized the richness, complexity and specificity of Black life in America: domestic expressions of style and standards of beauty, social and familial customs and, perhaps most significantly, an affirmative representation of Black history and its fundamental importance to American society. All told, Ebony and Jet offered an expansive celebration of Black success and culture more broadly, providing in turn a necessary counter, in both narrative and imagistic terms, to stereotyphes so regularly used in the mainstream press.

Theaster Gates often employs fabulation, parafiction, and propaganda as methods for the creation of new realities. Often born from preexisting truths, these new fictions imbue personal and cultural histories with new social, political, and artistic value. For When Clouds Roll Away, he will activate all three floors of the Stony Island Arts Bank, reimagining the formerly

abandoned South Side financial institution as the headquarters for a fictive, contemporary Black publishing company in the spirit of the Johnson Publishing legacy. This architectural-scale installation, which will host an active bar and lounge program, music series, and writing commissions reflecting on the archive, will experimentally extend the empire of Johnson Publishing Company under Gates’s artistic and creative direction.

When Clouds Roll Away continues Gates’ ongoing artistic and academic reflections on the Johnson Publishing Company and its legacy as one of the most important Black corporations, a rarity at the time of its founding. Originally housed at the Johnson Publishing Company building on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, Gates and Rebuild Foundation have been stewarding the Johnson Publishing Company’s library, ephemera, periodicals, furniture, inventory, and architectural fragments for over a decade. For the first time ever, Gates will exhibit newly restored objects, vintage office furniture, works of art owned by Johnson, along with his workout suite, trophies and memorabilia, making it his most comprehensive celebration of the archive to date.

A keystone work of the exhibition is Gates’s “Facsimile Cabinet of Women’s Origin Stories,” a participatory installation first presented at the Kunstmuseum Basel, in Basel, Switzerland (2018) as part of his exhibition Black Madonna. The installation has also been exhibited at Fondazione Prada in Milan, Gropius Bau in Berlin, Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, and Colby College in Waterville, Maine. A vast representation of Black female subjects, both famous and everyday women are given pride of place in this archive of over 3,000 images, primarily photographed by Moneta Sleet Jr. and Isaac Sutton. Made accessible to Gates by Linda Johnson Rice, his dear friend and daughter of John and Eunice Johnson, the archive attests to the multivalent experience of Black women in the United States, underscoring their beauty and their power in shaping American culture. Visitors are invited to explore and self-curate the installation by handling the framed photographs directly to create new sequences and unexpected juxtapositions. They are empowered to re-animate these historical Black images, engage with them in through personal encounter, and uphold these legacies in intimate ways.