Museum of Contemporary Art // David Hartt: Stray Light

David Hartt’s project Stray Light inaugurates a new series of media-based exhibitions at the MCA called MCA Screen. Hartt, a Chicago-based Canadian artist, has been working with photographs for many years, attracted to the social, cultural, political, and economic complexities of the subjects he captures, rendering them with a cool, dispassionate eye. Stray Light includes a film displayed in a room carpeted in the style of his subject, the Johnson Publishing Company building in Chicago, as well as a group of photographs in an adjacent room. Granted unprecedented access to film and photograph in this John Moutoussamy–designed building after a long process of earning the trust of the owners, Hartt earnestly records the time-capsule nature of the space, which meticulously heeds to Arthur Elrod’s original 1971 interior design.

The building was purpose-built as the headquarters of this important publishing company, made famous by its Jet and Ebony magazine titles and its role as a leading arbiter of African-American taste and culture during the latter half of the 20th century. Moutoussany was an African-American partner in the firm Dubin, Dubin, Black, and the eleven-story building has an iconic presence on South Michigan Avenue with its illuminated Ebony-Jet marquee at the top of the building. The interior of the building is a clear and exuberant expression of Black taste, resolutely modern, colorful, and complex, a pure expression of founder John Johnson’s vision of what a leading, Black-owned business can be.