Exhibitions

Isaac Sutton, portrait of Eartha Kitt. Johnson Publishing Company Archive and Theaster Gates Studio, courtesy Ford Foundation, J. Paul Getty Trust, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Smithsonian Institution

Theaster Gates: When Clouds Roll Away

Reflection and Restoration from the Johnson Archive

On View September 13, 2024 - March 16, 2025

Gallery Hours:

Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, 12 PM - 8 PM

Closed November 28 & 29

FREE - No RSVP Required

Rebuild Foundation is proud to present an exhibition by artist Theaster Gates featuring a suite of new works both inspired by and sourced from the Johnson Publishing Company (JPC) archive.

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 stereotypes 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. These works will be shown for the first time in their entirety in the United States, and notably, in Chicago, the former home and headquarters of Johnson Publishing Company.

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 through personal encounters and uphold these legacies in intimate ways.

The exhibition will complement the 12,000 volumes inside the Johnson Publishing Company Library, the reference library used by the editors of Ebony, Jet and Negro Digest magazines also housed at Stony Island Arts Bank. As Rebuild completes the cataloging of the library and establishes a new archive laboratory at the forthcoming St. Laurence Elementary School site, the organization is creating new opportunities for research, learning and artistic production around its archives.

Theaster Gates: When Clouds Roll Away: Reflection and Restoration from the Johnson Archive will be accompanied by a series of programs that will conclude with an archival convening which will invite specialists from around the world to gather and discuss the decolonization and future of Black archives.

Theaster Gates: When Clouds Roll Away: Reflection and Restoration from the Johnson Archive is part of Art Design Chicago, a citywide collaboration initiated by the Terra Foundation for American Art that highlights the city’s artistic heritage and creative communities. The exhibition is also supported by the Joyce Foundation, Linda Johnson Rice and the Mellon Foundation, whose contributions are assisting Rebuild’s efforts to completely catalog the Johnson Publishing Company Library.

For press inquiries, please reach out to Hannah Gottlieb-Graham at hannah@almacommunications.com.