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