Chicago artist Theaster Gates got the call around the time the Johnson Publishing Co. 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 Co., 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 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.
Q. What does “When Clouds Roll Away” mean exactly?
A. 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.
Q. How so?
A. 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.
Q. 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?
A. 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. …
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?