Founded in the 1942, the Johnson Publishing of Chicago has chronicled the lives of Black Americans for more than seven decades through Ebony and Jet magazines. Gates' work, comprising arguably the most important archive of Black American visual culture in the XNUMXth century, recontextualize and make these images and their stories visible again. The presentation of this new body of work is taken from the exhibition of Black Madonnaby Gates at the Kunstmuseum Basel in 2018, part of his larger Black Image Corporation project. As Gates says, “The Black Image Corporation” and is about projecting images around the world. The work invites visitors to directly engage with these rich and varied representations depicting women in their daily lives, historical moments and studio poses.
Presented in collaboration with the Lunder Institute for American Art, Facsimile Cabinet of Women Origin Stories will also inspire new research and creative output from the Lunder Institute, visiting scholars and artists interested in exploring the image of Black. Throughout the exhibition, local, national and international guests from a wide range of disciplines (including archivists, legal scholars, anthropologists and librarians, but also visual artists, filmmakers, writers and art historians) will be invited to spend time with the piece and reflect on its meaning through the lens of their particular area of expertise. The Lunder Institute will make the work resulting from these meetings available through a series of digital and print publications.
Theaster Gates (1973, Chicago) is Distinguished Visiting Artist and Director of Artist Initiatives at the Lunder Institute for American Art. Gates has exhibited extensively, including in group shows such as the Whitney Biennial, New York (2010); dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (2012); The Spirit of Utopia in Whitechapel, London (2013); and The Studio Museum of Harlem's When Stars Collide (2014). Solo exhibitions include To Speculate Darkly: Theater Gates and Dave, the Slave Potter at the Milwaukee Art Museum (2010), the Seattle Art Museum (2011), and MCA Chicago (2013); The Black Monastic Residence at Museu Serralves, Porto (2014); In the Tower: Theaster Gates: The Minor Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2017); Black Madonna at Kunstmuseum Basel (2018); and The Black Image Corporation at Fondazione Prada, Milan (2018). In 2013, Gates was awarded the inaugural Vera List Center Prize for Art and Politics. She has since won the Artes Mundi 6 Award (2015) and the Nasher Award (2018). Gates is also the founder of the nonprofit Rebuild Foundation.
