CHICAGO — Theaster Gates’s latest exhibition, When Clouds Roll Away: Reflection and Restoration from the Johnson Archive, would give all but the most radical archivist a heart attack.
It’s also utterly exciting, full of novel display tactics, ballsy creative repurposing, and plenty of dark humor, all of it done with great aesthetic panache. The show marks the artist’s most extensive engagement with the furnishings, objects, and images of the now-defunct Johnson Publishing Company, longtime chronicler of the lives of Black Americans in the magazines Ebony and Jet. Founded in 1942 by John H. and Eunice Johnson, at its height JPC was the largest Black-owned media enterprise in the world. On view throughout all three floors of the Stony Island Arts Bank until mid-March, When Clouds Roll Away should not be missed.
What’s here is a miscellany of vintage custom furniture, heirlooms, and architectural fragments from the former JPC headquarters on Michigan Avenue; sculptures Gates has created using JPC periodicals as material; other art of his making; a few blown-up fashion shots by Ebony staff photographers; and works from Gates’s personal collection by Kerry James Marshall, Barkley L. Hendricks, David Hartt, and more.
“Facsimile Cabinet of Women Origin Stories,” a standalone artwork that greets viewers at the Arts Bank entrance, has real potential to be a new model for presenting two-dimensional archival material. Essentially an elegant open shelving system, it houses approximately 800 photographs of Black women that Gates chose from the Ebony and Jet archives and had durably framed; visitors peruse the images and decide which ones to display. The day I was there, the selection included a scientist at work in her lab, an African tribal woman and her baby, a hair salon in action, various singers singing, and a stylish farmer feeding her chickens.
Most of the rest of When Clouds Roll Away is dedicated to tableaux arranged throughout the building, some of them ingenious, a few appearing like leftover furniture stuck in a corner. JPC carpet fragments fill one end of a gallery. Another is outfitted with John H. Johnson’s personal gym equipment, looking very much like minimalist sculpture, a droll effect enhanced by the monochrome elevator lobby panels in front of which they are posed. Custom credenzas in an outrageous array of luxury finishes are especially well deployed: On a long marbled sideboard, two tall Malian masks flank “2000s with a little bit of 60s,” Gates’s steel-framed, modernistic bas-relief of bound copies of Jet; nearby, a red alligator-covered cabinet, stacked on a platform, holds up a pushcart loaded with what seems to be a random assortment of African and other metalwork, including an antelope head whose elegance echoes the large framed photograph of a lithe model in an orange evening ensemble with plumed collar, hung above.
The effect is of a house museum gone wild. But unless you request a copy of the exhibition checklist or are extremely knowledgeable about mid-century design and contemporary art, forget about identifying one thing or another. The exhibition includes no captions and merely a single introductory wall text. On the one hand, woohoo! Wall labels are as disruptive of an immersive art-viewing experience as anything, and they’re somewhat beside the point in a practice like Gates’s that is all about imaginative reuse, where you only really need to know the general origin of stuff. On the other, some details that didactics could have provided are enlightening of African-American history and just plain respectful of the work of others.
Museums and even most commercial galleries would be hard pressed to let an artist do that sort of thing, but when you’ve got your own Kunsthalle, you can do what you want. The Stony Island Arts Bank, a once-crumbling savings and loan building sold to Gates by the city of Chicago for a dollar back in 2012, is the jewel of his visionary empire, run under the auspices of his nonprofit Rebuild Foundation. Rebuild additionally manages Gates’s other real-estate ventures, in which various distressed properties in his South Side neighborhood have been renovated and repurposed as communal cultural spaces.
Gates is also an excellent potter, a charismatic performer, and a custodian of numerous archives, including 60,000 glass lantern slides from the University of Chicago’s art history department, the vinyl collection of legendary house DJ Frankie Knuckles, and the 4,000 examples of “negrobilia” that comprise the Edward J. Williams Collection. He once bought up the entire inventory of a local hardware store that was going out of business. Gates preserves these artifacts, but to a greater extent he draws on them as material and inspiration for his own artwork. Historical accuracy is irrelevant. The one exception is his faithful rebuilding, on the lawn of the Arts Bank, of the gazebo where 12-year-old Tamir Rice was killed by a Cleveland police officer.
Also housed at the Arts Bank, in an elegant glass-walled space, is the 12,000-volume reference library of the Johnson Publishing Company. It came to Gates, as did the rest of the JPC salvage, at the behest of CEO Linda Johnson Rice, the founders’ daughter, who was forced to liquidate most of the company’s assets in the early 2010s. How Gates met Rice is told in A Johnson Publishing Story, a book produced for the artist’s first display of JPC items at the Arts Bank, in 2018. Iterations of his work with this archive have also appeared at the Walker Art Center, Gropius Bau, Fondazione Prada, and the art museums of Spelman and Colby Colleges. When Clouds Roll Away is a combination of everything in those shows and much more, and it will surely not be the last. The Johnson Publishing Company continues, sort of.
Theaster Gates: When Clouds Roll Away: Reflection and Restoration from the Johnson Archive continues at the Stony Island Arts Bank (6760 Stony Island Avenue, Chicago, Illinois) through March 16. The exhibition is part of Art Design Chicago and is presented by Rebuild Foundation and organized by the artist.
