Artist Theaster Gates will create a monumental ode to Black beauty at the Obama Presidential Center

By Jacqui Palumbo, CNN

(CNN) — When the Obama Presidential Center opens on Chicago’s South Side in the spring, a series of large-scale artworks and installations by some of America’s most important living artists will help set the tone of the nearly 20-acre cultural and civic complex.

The latest to be announced, by the artist Theaster Gates, will be a monumental portrait of Black life — and an ode to Black women, in particular — drawn from two vast photographic archives of vintage editorial images from Ebony and Jet magazines.

The long, two-part frieze, featuring images printed on aluminum alloy, will hang inside the center’s Forum Building. The atrium where it will be located will host public events and is named after Hadiya Pendleton, the teenage majorette who marched in former President Obama’s second inauguration parade and died by gun violence days later in 2013.

Gates’ frieze will be seen by passersby as well from Stony Island Avenue — a South Side thoroughfare with a rich cultural history that is also home to Gates’ gallery and archival space, the Stony Island Arts Bank, which is part of his larger foundation, Rebuild.

For nearly a decade, the Chicago-born artist has been the caretaker of the images and periodicals from the Johnson Publishing Company, the now defunct Black-owned media powerhouse behind Ebony and Jet magazines, which sold off its assets in 2016. Both publications began as vital sources of news, visual culture, beauty and style for Black Americans following World War II, and, as Gates explained in a video call, “amplified the dignity and the life of Black folk.”

Gates has continually returned to the Johnson Publishing Company’s archive in his work, including most recently at dual exhibitions at the Smart Museum of Art (on view until February) and the Gray Chicago gallery. At the Obama Presidential Center, he has selected some 20 images from that archive, in addition to portraits by Howard Simmons, a groundbreaking commercial photographer and photojournalist who shot for the Johnson Publishing Company as well as the Chicago Sun-Times and whom Gates met around three years ago.

“When given this opportunity to think about what I have to offer, I think that the archive — the photojournalistic and artistic ambition of Black creatives in the ’60s and ’70s is an unmatched period,” he said of his new works for the center. “People were taking photos not to make money, but to keep culture alive and tell the story of culture.”

He described the work as “something old and something new,” as he recontextualizes them within this larger artwork, playing with scale and material. “These images are not just historic artifacts; they are the foundational images of Black life,” he explained.

Art as a ‘great connector’

The center’s curator of art commissions, Virginia Shore, said that Gates’ use of the images “underscores the power and possibility of Black modernity, particularly in Chicago.”

According to Shore, the former president has been extensively involved with selecting each commissioned artist and the discussions around the works. In September, the center announced the participation of renowned artists Nick Cave, Jenny Holzer and Kiki Smith, among seven others. A year prior, it revealed that the painter Julie Mehretu would work with glass for the first time to create an 83-foot-tall window comprising 35 painted abstract panels.

“During the Obama administration, we saw that art and artists were so important to the Obamas and their mission,” said Louise Bernard, director of the museum of the Obama Presidential Center, on a joint video call with Shore. “We know that art is just such a great connector. It convenes people, it engages them to think about ideas in new and creative ways. And so we are building a presidential center unlike any other — the whole site is being activated by art.”

In the lobby of the center’s museum, Cave and Marie Watt will collaborate on an enormous multimedia installation combining textile and sound as well as their Black and Indigenous traditions, respectively. In the museum’s skyroom, Holzer will pay tribute to the Civil Rights-era Freedom Riders using text from the FBI’s files. In the Harriet Tubman courtyard, Nekisha Durrett will hand paint ceramic tiles to reimagine the shawl of the famed abolitionist; over in the library’s main reading room, Aliza Nisenbaum will create a mural centering the public library as a site for storytelling, dreaming, knowledge and shared histories, according to a press release.

Together, the commissioned pieces celebrate a diverse and esteemed group of American artists, who pay tribute to the tapestry of American history and culture during a turbulent period for the arts, particularly for artists of color and the institutions and funding that support them, during the second Trump administration.

A takeaway from the center’s museum, Bernard explained, is that “democracy is always a work in progress. There’s always a push and pull; progress is never linear.

“We ask all the visitors who will come to the center to see themselves as changemakers.”

For Gates, who works across many artistic disciplines, the commission was an opportunity to continue to expand on his practice as a steward of cultural collections. They include, in addition to the Johnson Publishing Company, 60,000 glass lantern slides covering art and architectural history from the University of Chicago; the personal vinyl collection of the late house music pioneer Frankie Knuckles; and 4,000 objects of “negrobilia” — objects derogatory to Black people — collected by the Art Institute of Chicago trustee Edward J. Williams and his wife Ana to remove them from public.

“I’m trying to imagine that there are other ways of being artistic that don’t have to do with the creation of a consumable good for the market,” Gates said. “And I think that being active in archives is essentially a way of being an informal historian. Lord knows, we need to keep certain truths about history alive so that those histories don’t succumb to these falsehoods that are being generated today.

“I feel like part of my job is to just try to be the reminder that that Black people have been doing great things for a long time,” he added. “How we understand American progress has everything to do with the contributions of all people — but especially the contributions of Black and brown people.”

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