Chicago artist Theaster Gates got the call around the time the Johnson Publishing Company closed its Michigan Avenue headquarters in 2011. On the other line was Linda Johnson Rice, the daughter of John and Eunice Johnson, the founders of the historic publisher.
“She asked me if I was willing to be the kind of caretaker of the things within that building, [including] the photographs, so the library, the furniture. She said, essentially, whatever you’re able to retain, retrieve, exhume from the building is yours,” Gates recalled of the conversation with Johnson Rice. “And so I’ve been living with these objects for the last decade now.”
Johnson Publishing Company, which was home of Ebony and Jet magazines, was one of the most iconic and influential institutions in Chicago. The company materials and ephemera donated to Gates are on display in his new exhibition When Clouds Roll Away: Reflection and Restoration from the Johnson Archive. The exhibit lives in the Stony Island Arts Bank, formerly the Stony Island Trust & Savings Bank, which Gates acquired from the city of Chicago for $1. The space, which was once a bank in the prohibition era, has been transformed into a Black archive.
WBEZ’s The Rundown host Erin Allen sat down with Theaster Gates — founder of the Rebuild Foundation — to discuss his efforts to preserve these spaces and artifacts. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Erin Allen: Tell me about the name, what does When Clouds Roll Away mean exactly?
Theaster Gates: It feels a bit Missionary Baptist Church to me, that when the clouds are gathered, it’s a sign of forewarning or danger or discomfort. Nature and discomfort. When they roll away, it represents, kind of like the end of passing hardship. And I think for me, at least with my friendship with Linda Johnson Rice and my concern about Black objects, when the company was transitioning, I felt like there was a big cloud over me, and there was a big cloud over Johnson Publishing.
How so?
There’s part of me that feels like I wish the city would have done more to save the building and resuscitate the organization. That I have strong opinions about the future of that site and what its fate was, from being sold to Columbia College to being sold to micro-apartment makers. And so I think that that cloud that loomed over me, it was a period of kind of real darkness for me. Now, a lot of the furniture has been restored. We’ve taken sections of the carpet that was there, sections of the wallpaper, some of the images, and we’ve tried to kind of make a survey of the Johnson Publishing Company’s building as a work of art.
The Johnson Publishing Company is most known for two of its publications: Jet magazine and Ebony magazine. Growing up in the 90s, I didn’t realize that these two publications were from the same publisher. One was weekly, one was monthly. They were different sizes. They felt different. But getting into your work, I’ve learned from you and your archiving and your canon of work around the archive, that they were actually in conversation with each other. Can you talk about that?
First, it’s important to articulate that they were both based on popular Americana periodicals. So Ebony was based on Life magazine, and Jet was based on Reader’s Digest.
So Ebony had the burden of presenting long form writing, pretty sophisticated advertising, critical reflections on Black life, and it was doing the work of early networking and connecting via the periodical. So it was saying, you know, our national society of Black dentists were getting together. The ladies of Alpha Kappa Alpha, here’s our mission. And they were connecting Black people via their periodical. It’s hard to imagine life without the internet, but they were the World Wide Web.
I think Jet magazine was much more like the journal for everyday living. It told you what times and on what stations Black television was happening. It told you what the top 10, the top 20, top 100 hits were by Blacks. You might find out a little bit of gossip, and you got your beauty of the week. And so it was also kind of like celebrating the ways that Black folks show up, and then putting that dignity and that sexiness and that like, Friday after work. It was putting that on the main stage and in a way, teaching us how to be more dignified, more sexy, more respectable, what makeup to use. It was aiding the cultivation of middle class values in the Black American imagination.
As your work has evolved, you’ve started to think more about the everyday Black people living life. It reminds me of photography, of Cecil McDonald Jr., capturing a girl dancing in the hallway at home, things like that. And as a person who is archiving, who is contemplating large amounts of work around Black life, tell me about the importance of approaching your work that way.
When people think about the value of the archive, they’re like, oh, there are these candid shots of James Brown and Aretha Franklin and kind of the who’s who of culture. And that’s true, but by and large, you had amazing photographic journalists who are going all over the country and in sometimes other parts of the world, interviewing everyday people. Talking to the school teacher about what she thinks about Black boys in education. Talking to the orthodontist about, like, what’s the future of medicine?
I decided that I would focus my energy on the Black female, kind of every day. Or the Black woman as the Black Madonna. And the more common, the more unknown, the more Madonna-like she is. And so I think that there is a lot of notable stuff [here], but by demonstrating that 90% of the work that Johnson Publishing did was about everyday people, it means that it was about people just like me on 68th and Stony Island, on 69th and Dorchester, on 70th and Loomis. That it was about Black life. And then that was punctuated with, you know, Diana Ross and the Jackson Five.
You’ve spent so much time with these archives. And with this exhibition, we’re gonna see pieces that are newly restored. It’s the most comprehensive celebration of the archive, but can you think back to first coming upon this collection?
At the time that I was crafting the acquisition of the Arts Bank from the city of Chicago, I was trying to figure out, what would I fill it with? If I got the building, would the building be a place for just a social hang? Would it be kind of artists in residence? Would it be a venue of sorts? And in a way, once we got acquisition of the building, my meeting Linda Johnson Rice and her making the offering of her library, those things dovetailed. So in a way, the arts bank is deeply connected to the library of Johnson Publishing Company. So much so, that we built the hearth of the building around the library.
The early days was this amazing woman who carried this legacy was trusting this younger artist with her library. And I made good on the library. Two years in, the building opened, the library was in place by 2013 things were looking pretty good. And the city was coming, the Arts Bank was starting to be recognized as an important Black space.
At that point, Linda needed to decide what to do with the rest of the things that were coming out of the building. And she came back to me, and that felt like trust. That Linda, the Black business community, a kind of an important family in the city, you know, all those things that might seem socially political, that Linda Johnson Rice was trusting an artist with her family’s legacy.
And I think when that happened at about 2013, 2014, it’s when I realized the work that I was doing was not just the kind of rescue and redemption — I was building the foundation for a platform for Black archivists and Black collecting and building a kind of third space where, if on the South Side or the West Side, you expect to see some things on the block. You don’t expect to see a Black archive. Could it be a necessary part of the architectural image of our city that every block should have an archive of what’s been going on in that neighborhood? I think that, in that sense, the bank is trying to do this demonstrative work of setting an example for the objects that come in. We haven’t been able to do this quickly. It took us six years to digitize Frankie Knuckles’ albums. We’re just at the edge of cataloging all of Johnson Publishing, but it’s like it’s given Rebuild [Foundation] a purpose.