Theaster Gates - The Black Image Corporation
The Black Image Corporation is a boxed set of photographs from the Johnson Publishing Company archive, published by Fondazione Prada for the exhibition Theaster Gates conceived at its Osservatorio in Milan in 2018–19.
The box holds a 32-page booklet from the foundation’s Quaderni series, 183 loose cards and 36 vellum sheets. The cards reproduce more than three hundred photographs by Moneta Sleet Jr. and Isaac Sutton, both photographers in the archive, and Delpire & Co. describes them as portraits of Black women. The vellums carry copies of photo-editing marks and notes that Johnson staff made on some of the originals. The cards are made to hang from a brass fastener on the box, as they did in the exhibition. The booklet holds a conversation between Gates and Linda Johnson Rice, chairwoman of the company. The text is in English and Italian, and the set was designed by JNL Design of Chicago.
John H. and Eunice Johnson founded the company in Chicago in 1942, and Delpire says its Ebony and Jet photo archive holds more than four million images. Gates trained in urban planning and in the tradition of Japanese ceramics, and his biography names custodianship and reuse of culturally significant Black objects, archives and spaces as the base of his practice. He is a professor at the University of Chicago and won the Nasher Sculpture Prize in 2018 and the Artes Mundi 6 Prize in 2015.
