Photographer sues Mickalene Thomas and four galleries over 820 Ebony/Jet photos
Barbara Karant says the artist copied more than a dozen of her Johnson Publishing Company interiors for installations and collages.
Law and Crime
A Chicago photographer has sued artist Mickalene Thomas and four galleries representing her, alleging Thomas built installations and collages around more than a dozen of the photographer's copyrighted images of the former Johnson Publishing Company headquarters.
Barbara Karant and her company, Karant + Associates, filed the lawsuit May 26 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. It names Thomas, her studio entity, and the galleries Lévy Gorvy Dayan, Yancey Richardson, Kavi Gupta and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, and it demands a jury trial.
"In installation after installation, and in collage after collage, Thomas has engaged in the wholesale copying of copyrighted works from a fellow artist," the complaint said.
The images at issue come from Karant's series 820 Ebony/Jet, which documents the interiors of the Johnson Publishing Company building at 820 South Michigan Avenue.
The company, founded by John H. Johnson in 1942, published the magazines Ebony and Jet and occupied the downtown Chicago headquarters from 1972 until 2012.
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Court Documents: Karant copyright suit against Mickalene Thomas
Court records from U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.
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Karant, an adjunct professor at Columbia College Chicago when the school bought the building, received permission to photograph the space in 2012. Between 2013 and 2015, she spent six to eight hours per visit over about 40 trips to photograph inside the building.
Her lawsuit noted the 110,000-square-foot building was minimally heated in winter and had no air conditioning in summer. She produced over 250 images during her visits.
The series was featured in both Slate and The New York Times, which described the images as celebrating "the visual dynamism of early-1970s architectural and interior design." Karant's work is held in collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Saint Louis Art Museum.
Karant said she discovered the alleged copying in August 2025 when she found a Thomas collage that allegedly incorporated her photographs without permission or credit. Looking further, she identified numerous other instances involving more than a dozen of her images.
One recurring example is a photograph of the Ebony Fashion Fair dressing room and its three-panel mirror, which the complaint said Thomas made "the literal centerpiece" of an installation.
The suit pointed to Thomas's traveling survey “All About Love,” which opened at The Broad in Los Angeles in 2024, along with installations at the Hayward Gallery in London, the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, and Lévy Gorvy's 2021 exhibition "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" in London.
"The vibrant, patterned shapes, the ceiling lights, and the patterned wallpaper ... were all lifted from Karant's photographs of the JPC interiors," the complaint said of the Broad installation.
The suit also cited Thomas's collages, among them Nus Exotiques #10, which it said reproduces one of Karant's photographs rotated 90 degrees.
Two Instagram posts in which Thomas is photographed in front of works that allegedly contain Karant's images are also included in the lawsuit. In one post, Thomas credited Andy Warhol as inspiration "all while ignoring the works that she had directly lifted from Karant + Associates,” the lawsuit said.
Karant registered ten of the JPC photographs with the U.S. Copyright Office in July 2016 and obtained two additional registrations in November and December 2025, the complaint said. She has a book of the series, 820 Ebony/Jet: the Johnson Publishing Company, an American Icon, slated for publication in September 2026 by MW Editions.
Thomas "used Karant's photography to enhance her reputation and sell her work," the complaint said, and the copying has damaged Karant's ability to license and sell her own images and threatens the market for the forthcoming book.
The complaint brought six counts of copyright infringement, one against each defendant, and calls the conduct "willful." It alleged the galleries, as sophisticated dealers, knew or should have known that displaying and selling the works infringed Karant's copyrights.
Karant is asking the court to find infringement, order a permanent injunction, require an accounting of all sales involving the images, and award actual or statutory damages under the Copyright Act along with costs and attorney's fees.
Karant filed in Chicago rather than New York, where Thomas lives and works, citing the artist's ties to the district. The complaint noted Thomas has been represented by the Chicago-based Kavi Gupta Gallery since 2014 and has exhibited in the city multiple times.
Lévy Gorvy Dayan told ARTnews that it is "deeply respectful of all artists' rights and creativity and has deep admiration for artists' creative processes," declining further comment while the case is pending.
The case is assigned to U.S. District Judge Thomas M. Durkin, who on Wednesday granted a joint motion extending Lévy Gorvy Dayan's deadline to respond to the complaint to August 31 and pushing the parties' joint status report to September 14, documents show.
The suit is not Thomas's only active litigation. Urgent Matter previously reported that she is seeking to dismiss a separate suit brought in New York by her former fiancée, the collector and curator Racquel Chevremont, who has accused the artist of subjecting her to an "abusive work environment."
Follow along with other lawsuits at Urgent Matter's art lawsuit tracker.
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