When the nearly 20-acre cultural and civic campus opens on Chicago’s South Side this spring, art will do much of the talking. Among the newly announced commissions for the Obama Presidential Center is a monumental, two-part frieze by Theaster Gates, transforming historic images of Black women into a sweeping meditation on Black beauty.
Installed inside the Forum Building, Gates’ work draws from two vast photographic archives of vintage editorial shots from Ebony and Jet magazines, the iconic publications that shaped Black visual culture in the decades following World War II. Printed on aluminum alloy and scaled to architectural proportions, the images form a comprehensive portrait of Black life, with a particular reverence for Black women.
The frieze will live in the building’s atrium, a public gathering space named after Hadiya Pendleton, the teenage majorette who performed at President Barack Obama’s second inauguration and was killed by gun violence just days later in 2013. The work will also be visible from Stony Island Avenue, a historic South Side thoroughfare and the same corridor where Gates operates the Stony Island Arts Bank, home to much of his archival work through his foundation, Rebuild.
For Gates, the commission is both deeply personal and part of a long-standing practice. For nearly a decade, the Chicago-born artist has served as caretaker of the Johnson Publishing Company archive, which includes Ebony and Jet. The Black-owned media powerhouse sold its assets in 2016, but the images live on through Gates’ stewardship and continued artistic reimagining.
“These publications amplified the dignity and the life of Black folk,” Gates said during a video call, reflecting on the magazines’ cultural impact. From fashion spreads to photojournalism, the imagery offered Black Americans a mirror — and a declaration — of their own humanity.
At the Obama Presidential Center, Gates selected roughly 20 images from the archive, pairing them with portraits by Howard Simmons, a groundbreaking photographer whose work appeared in Johnson Publishing titles as well as the Chicago Sun-Times. “These images are not just historic artifacts,” Gates told CNN. “They are the foundational images of Black life.”
Louise Bernard, director of the center’s museum, told reporters that art is central to the Obama legacy. “We know that art is such a great connector,” Bernard said. “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.”
Throughout the campus, those activations will take many forms. Cave and Marie Watt will collaborate on a multimedia installation in the museum lobby that merges textile and sound traditions rooted in Black and Indigenous cultures. In the skyroom, Holzer will honor Civil Rights-era Freedom Riders using text drawn from FBI files. Nekisha Durrett will reimagine Harriet Tubman’s shawl through hand-painted ceramic tiles in the Tubman courtyard, while Aliza Nisenbaum will paint a mural in the library reading room that centers the public library as a place of shared history, imagination, and knowledge.
Together, the commissions reflect a broad spectrum of American artists working across disciplines — and arriving at the center during a period of heightened uncertainty for the arts, particularly for artists of color and the institutions that support them.
In a building designed for gathering, Gates’ frieze doesn’t just look back. It stands watch — a living archive asking every passerby to see what has always been there.
