A copyright fight brewing in Illinois’ federal district court is shaping up to be one of the more consequential appropriation cases the art world has seen in years — and it hits at the heart of how photographers protect their work in an era of remix culture.
Photographer Barbara Karant, whose images live in collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, filed suit against artist Mickalene Thomas for allegedly appropriating more than a dozen of her photographs without consent or attribution. Thomas is celebrated for her paintings and photo-based collages, but Karant’s complaint frames the artist’s practice in far blunter terms: “in installation after installation, and in collage after collage, Thomas has engaged in the wholesale copying of copyrighted works from a fellow artist.”
At the center of the dispute sits Karant’s 820 Ebony/Jet (2013–15) series — 250 images documenting the vacant interiors of the Johnson Publishing Company building in Chicago. Until 2019, Johnson Publishing was one of the largest African-American media companies in the U.S., owning Ebony and Jet until 2016. Karant finished the series in 2015, capturing the eerie stillness of a once-vibrant cultural institution.
According to the complaint, Thomas’ 2024 exhibition All About Love incorporated Karant’s copyrighted photos without due attribution, including one shot in an Ebony Fashion Fair dressing room and two of patterned walls inside the headquarters. The lawsuit alleges that “the vibrant, patterned shapes, the ceiling lights, and the patterned wallpaper… were all lifted from Karant’s photographs of the JPC interiors.”
The claim doesn’t stop at the exhibition. Karant argues that Thomas drew on additional works from her archive, singling out Nus Exotiques #10 (2025) — a collage of a nude Black woman alongside part of a window — which she says was pulled from an image in the 820 Ebony/Jet series.
Timing sharpens the stakes. The legal action arrives ahead of Karant’s forthcoming book 820 Ebony/Jet: Visions of the Johnson Publishing Company, an American Icon, due out in the coming months. Karant contends the alleged infringement has undermined her ability to license and sell her photographs while threatening the commercial prospects of the book.
For anyone who follows creative-industry law, the case rhymes loudly with Cariou v. Prince. Photographer Patrick Cariou sued artist Richard Prince in 2008 after Prince folded dozens of Cariou’s Rastafarian portraits into paintings and collages. A lower court found Prince liable, but a federal appeals court later ruled most of the works were sufficiently transformative to qualify as fair use — a landmark decision that many photographers felt eroded their protections.
That precedent is exactly why Karant v. Thomas matters beyond these two artists. The fair-use “transformative” standard remains one of the murkiest lines in copyright law, and every high-profile collage dispute recalibrates where creators — and the tools they use to remix imagery — actually stand.
