Theaster Gates stared hard at a room full of furniture. There were credenzas, chairs, desks, chests, a cube resembling an office refrigerator. Behind them, framed correspondence, photographs.
Much of it came to him in 2010 after Johnson Publishing Co., home of Ebony and Jet magazines, vacated South Michigan Avenue. An office tower’s worth of furnishings, loose magazines, books, art and history needed a new home, and fast.
Johnson Publishing was going through the final pains of watching its traditional place on newsstands vanish. So Columbia College stepped in and bought 820 S. Michigan.
Johnson had occupied it since the early 1970s. It was the first building in downtown Chicago owned by a Black man. It’s still the only downtown skyscraper from a Black architect (John Warren Moutoussamy).
But Gates got a lot of the stuff from the landmark building. At least 15,000 objects in total, roughly 6,000 square feet of office ephemera, the majority of it from the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. Thinking of those frantic days when the building was closing, he smiled sadly: “I am always thriving in decay.
” He said this in the lobby of the Stony Island Arts Bank near Jackson Park, the Prohibition-era savings and loan building he bought in 2012 for $1. Soon after, he raised the money, restored the imposing old bank for $4.5 million and turned it into a home base for the Rebuild Foundation, his innovative group that has, among other projects, created the Dorchester Arts + Housing Collabor.