Theaster Gates, On Black Foundations, 2012, wood, glass, plastic, paper and makeup, dimensions variable; at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

In the May 2015 issue of Art in America, I published a review of “Speaking of People: Ebony, Jet, and Contemporary Art,” an exhibition that was on view at the Studio Museum in Harlem from November 2014 to March 2015. The review begins:

In January, Chicago’s Johnson Publishing Company, the force behind the magazines Ebony and Jet, announced that it would offer for sale its photo archive, which spans 70 years and includes five million images of African-American life, from pictures of Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral to glamour shots of Billie Holiday. The company hopes to garner $40 million, which would help make up for declining revenues and facilitate the transition from print to digital. In the right hands, Johnson’s CEO recently said, the archive could be the “black Getty.”