When you think about presidential libraries, you probably don’t picture fine art. Among the 13 institutions in the United States dedicated to a more recent slate of presidents, only one features a notable commission: an expansive mural created in 1960-61 by regionalist Thomas Hart Benton for the lobby of the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum in Independence, Mo.
Chicago will be the exception, keeping with President Barack Obama’s vision for a presidential center that veers far from the conventional approach to presidential libraries. Obama and his wife, Michelle, envisioned art as being a fundamental part of the $800 million Obama Presidential Center when it opens on Juneteenth after 10 years of planning and construction.
At the couple’s impetus, 28 famous and not-so-famous artists (including two duos) have been commissioned to create 26 large-scale works for the four-building complex inhabiting 19.3 acres on Chicago’s South Side. The Jackson Park site, intended as a vehicle for youth engagement and community revitalization, will not hold Oval Office archives. Rather, it will function as a hub for Chicagoans to get together – whether it’s through the campus athletic center, its library branch or its art gallery.
Setting it even further apart from its predecessors, this presidential center has its own curator who has zeroed in on a varied mix of artists from up-and-comers to contemporary masters. Her list includes some of Chicago’s most prominent Black artists, including multimedia artist Theaster Gates, welded-steel sculptor Richard Hunt and sculptor/installation artist Nick Cave (in collaboration with in Portland, Ore., indigenous textile artist Marie Watt).
The arts and humanities were an essential feature of the Obama White House and continue to be a major part of the couple’s work today, said Virginia Shore, the Obama Center’s curator of commissions. “It is a belief in art being reflective of our national soul,” she said. “Those are the president’s words – that art opens minds and nourishes souls – and we know this to be true.”
All but a handful of the chosen artists have been announced. The list also includes such art-world heavy-hitters as abstract painter Mark Bradford, Ethiopian-born painter Julie Mehretu and word artist Jenny Holzer, whose graphic public works have popped up on everything from billboards and LED tickers to T-shirts.
Commissioned, too, are such influential figures as multidisciplinary artist Kiki Smith and socio-political photographer Carrie Mae Weems as well as emerging artists like Tyanna Buie, an associate professor at the Rhode Island School of Design.
“It was unbelievable,” Buie said of her selection. “I think it is still unbelievable.”
Obama Center officials declined to say how much money is being spent on the art, including production, transportation and installation, but it is clearly in the millions of dollars. Whatever the exact size of the art budget, it dwarfs that of any previous presidential library or museum, according to Benjamin Hufbauer, author of the book, “Presidential Temples: How Memorials and Libraries Shape Public Memory.”
“They picked slightly cutting-edge, avant-garde names that showed a knowledge of the artists,” said Hufbauer, an associate professor of humanities at the University of Louisville, pointing to their unconventional choices of artists for their official depictions at the National Portrait Gallery – painters Kehinde Wiley (Barack) and Amy Sherald (Michelle).
Louise Bernard, senior vice president of the Obama Foundation and director of the Obama Presidential Center Museum, said the commissioned artworks will play a key role in “activating” the spaces and connecting with visitors.
“The arts,” Bernard said, “are helping us to tell a broader story about democracy, about freedom of expression, about the relationship between creativity and innovation and the work that artists do in helping us to imagine the world as it is and the world as it ought to be.”
Themes of democracy
Buie said she was first contacted in 2023 about a potential project but didn’t know it was for the Obama Center until she was informed of the official commission via a Zoom call in May 2024. After a back and forth of proposals, her final concept was approved later that year, a work titled “Be the Change!”
The artist, 42, was born in Chicago and split her time as a child shuttling between this city and Milwaukee, living alternately with an aunt and in the foster-care system. She went on to pursue art studies at Western Illinois University and then the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Her installation, which will be mounted on a wall 27 feet wide and 12 feet wide in the Democracy In Action Lounge, features framed images of different ways that people enact change. Those depictions are in turn mounted on a semi-abstracted background with screenprinted fragments of newspaper front pages trumpeting Obama’s presidential victory.
The inspiration for the work came from Buie’s taking part in Chicago’s annual Bud Billiken Parade when she was a member of a group for children and young adults at Salem Baptist Church The participants were assigned to ride a “Barack Obama for Senator” float and periodically perform dance routines.
She and her companions didn’t know who Obama was at the time: “When he came up to us, we were all in awe. He was tall and charismatic. We were like, ‘Who is this man?’”
A new vision for a community hub
The Obama Center campus consists of four structures – the Museum Building, the most prominent at 225 feet in height; the Forum Building, which includes the Elie Wiesel Auditorium and a restaurant; a Chicago Public Library branch and an athletic facility – that all contain commissioned artworks. More art is sited outdoors in courtyards, gardens and other spaces.
When it opens in June with the rest of the center, the Obama Center Museum will have a 5,000-square-foot gallery that will host exhibitions organized by potentially a rotating series of curators. Tickets to the museum will go on sale in May with pricing “in line with other Chicago cultural institutions,” foundation officials have said.
Shore was hired in 2019 to oversee the art commissions for the project. “It’s a totally new vision for a community center, a presidential center,” she said. “And it involves a president and first lady whom I hugely admire, so I was very excited.”
Shore served for 20 years as chief curator and acting director of the U.S. Department of State’s Office of Art in Embassies, where she oversaw art commissions for 79 new diplomatic facilities. In addition, she has held such positions as curator and adviser to the Fredriksen Collection of modern and contemporary art in partnership with the National Museum of Norway in 2018-25 and runs her own consulting firm, Shore Art Advisory in Washington, D.C.
The curator drew on that extensive background to put together a list of potential artists, with President Obama making the final decisions in every case and Michelle Obama playing an integral role as well.
“It was showing existing work by the artist, thinking about the space, thinking about possibilities and also the artists’ stories and the focus of their work. They’re all changemakers in their own ways,” Shore said.
Diversity was important, not just ensuring a high representation of women and people of color, but also a mix of artists who are older and younger, American and international, well-established and avant-garde.
In addition, there is an emphasis on Chicago artists like Gates, Cave, Sam Kirk and Dorian Sylvain or those with local connections, such as Lindsay Adams and Aliza Nisenbaum, who have degrees from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Gates’ work, which honors Hadiya Pendleton—a 15-year-old Chicago student who marched in Pres. Obama’s second inauguration parade and was killed a week later during a shooting at a South Side park – uses images from the Johnson Publishing Co. archive and holdings of former Sun-Times photographer Howard Simmons. It stretches some 175 feet around an atrium in the Forum Building that carries Pendleton’s name.
Once the Obama Center opens, attention to the newly installed artworks will not end. “The commissions are considered to be permanent,” Bernard said, “but will be continually reactivated through programming, which is the living nature of a cultural institution.”
“The Center is a living legacy in many ways of the Obama presidency,” Bernard said, “and it is a gift back to the community. It tells a national story, but it has a global reach, and we do think about how the arts resonate on a global platform.”
Four major artworks to see at the Obama Presidential Center
Mark Bradford, “City of the Big Shoulders,” mixed media on canvas, 38 by 28½ feet, Our Story Atrium, Museum Building.
The Los Angeles-based artist confronts subjects like marginalized communities in his layered, abstract paintings crafted out of paper, including sometimes transparent “end papers” used in hairdressing. His monumental, three-story painting maps Chicago via fragmented imagery and collapsed perspectives. “It’s a complicated space, and you will never see the entire piece in one vista,” said Virginia Shore, curator of commissions. “He’s a good example of an artist who was able to take over an incredibly complicated space and really pull it all together.”
Maya Lin, “Seeing Through the Universe,” silver cloud granite, Ann Dunham Water Terrace.
Lin is best known for the somber, meditative Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C, which she designed as a 21-year-old undergraduate student as an entry in a public competition. In subsequent decades, she has designed other memorials but has also devoted herself to artworks that deal with topography and the environment. One of Pres. Obama’s favorite artists, she has created a two-part water feature incorporating a large flat stone (“Lozenge”) nearly 10 feet across and a standing, donut-like 11-foot-tall stone (“Oculus”).
Julie Mehretu, “Uprising of the Sun,” stained glass, 83 by 25 feet, north façade, Museum Building.
Drawing on shadow imagery related to contemporary socio-political issues and exploring history and space, this renowned, Ethiopian-born artist has radically reimagined and refreshed abstraction with her gestural, large-scale canvases. Working with the Franz Mayer Studio in Munich, Mehretu created her first-ever stained-glass work, a massive polychromatic window which incorporates a range of techniques including freehand airbrushing.
Kiki Smith, “Receive” from the “Moon and Stars” series, bronze with silver-nitrate patina, dimensions to be determined, main lobby, Museum Building.
Smith, now something of a grande dame of contemporary artists at 72, has created works across a range of mediums that draw on mythology and folklore and engage with such subjects as female identity and the multiple stages of the life cycle. She has created a bronze wall sculpture featuring celestial motifs and offers what Obama Center leaders describe as “hope, orientation and solace” at the heart of the museum.