From the early 1940s on, the Johnson Publishing Company (JPC) filled a crucial niche that no other conglomeration of its time could: it represented Black America as it saw itself. Through its flagship magazine Ebony and sister publication Jet, JPC navigated fluidly through the Civil Rights movement (in all its incarnations, dedicating large articles to both the March on Washington and the Black Power movement) while maintaining exhaustive coverage of African American creative producers.

        Though JPC moved out of its Michigan Avenue high-rise in 2010, its legacy and possessions have continued to provide gratification for Chicagoans—only now through museum exhibits, not print media. Theaster Gates recently assembled a great deal of JPC’s original furnishings at his Stony Island Arts Bank, where a three floor installation carries on the company’s endeavor of celebrating Black greatness. Those wishing to immerse themselves in JPC before Stony Island reopens in February 2026 need not fret, as a concurrent show at the DuSable Museum showcases highlights from its eclectic art collection.

        JPC tended to collect artists similar in temperament to their publications: vivifying of everyday Black life while being socially engaged about racial inequality. (Or, as Ebony’s first edition put it, to “talk turkey” while acknowledging race as “the No. 1 problem of America.”) One such artist was Garrett Whyte, who contributed a satirical comic strip entitled “Mr. Jim Crow” to the Chicago Defender in the late 40s. (Issues featured a beaked caricature of segregationist politicians embroiled—hilariously, despite the serious subject matter—in the contradictions wrought by racist ideology.) His Rose of Sharon, created two decades after his comic stint, evinces his taste for more poignant subjects: it depicts with breathtaking stillness a swarthy, Madonna-esque woman against a gold background.

        JPC’s fondness for comic artists with religious underpinnings also led them to collect the work of Alvin C. Hollingsworth, represented here by a shoulder-up portrait of Jesus carrying a cross. The subject’s usual trappings—halo, crown of thorns, crowd of disciples—are rendered by Hollingsworth with gleaming contours of red and blue. While Whyte and Hollingsworth employ those conventionally thought to belong to the Renaissance, the stern countenances which figure so heavily in each work give these once-opulent scenes a sense of divine solemnity.

        Though its publications centered on the Black experience in America, JPC’s collectors didn’t hesitate to incorporate paintings by non-Americans. Natives of Haiti figure especially prominently: Fritz Rock’s The Market Scene, for instance, renders a scene of hustle and bustle in his hometown of Port-au-Prince. Its buyers and sellers are rendered economically with a sharp-edge geometry that can start to feel cubist—each figure seems to tumble into the next. (Its clutter of bodies recalls the nightlife paintings of Archibald Motley, an artist represented in the DuSable Museum’s permanent collection.)

        Conversely, Philton LaTortue’s Terrestrial Paradise series encloses a profoundly calm instant in a populous jungle. That LaTortue, another Port-au-Prince native, was labeled a “naif” (“naive” in English) artist by a prize he won in 1980 is oddly patronizing—he was formally educated at great length, including at Paris’s prestigious Academie des Beaux Arts. JPC recognized artists like LaTortue not under the condescending banner of “naive artists” or “outsider artists” but as no-strings-attached “artists,” bringing long-deserved recognition to names who were often overlooked.

        Susan Simmons’s 1983 canvas of JPC’s high-rise on Michigan Avenue brings to mind its unparalleled achievements: it was the first African American-owned building in downtown Chicago and remains today the only Chicago high-rise designed by a Black architect. JPC’s effects in the media world were similarly groundbreaking, resonating with African Americans en masse like nothing else since. Though its headquarters has since been converted into an apartment complex, the JPC sign—which endorses its two flagship publications—remains, attesting to the continued legacy of Black greatness that the company embodied.

Charles Venkatesh Young is a Chicago-based journalist of the arts interested in fusing art theory with bodily experience. He has contributed to the New Art Examiner, Chicago Reader, Newcity, and Whitehot Magazine.