Obama Presidential Center Opens in Chicago With Major Commissions by 25 Artists
Chicago’s newest cultural landmark is preparing to open with an art program that is as expansive as the building itself. The Obama Presidential Center, which opens to the public on June 19, brings together major commissions by 25 artists across its eight-story museum building, library, and grounds, turning the site into a dense survey of contemporary public art.
Designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, the granite-clad complex places art at the center of the visitor experience. The most closely watched work is Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s “The Obamas: Springing Forth,” unveiled to Barack and Michelle Obama on June 14. The Nigerian-American artist’s portrait is being described as the first official portrait of the couple, and it hangs in the lobby, where visitors can enter without a ticket.
Akunyili Crosby, a 2017 MacArthur fellow, built the work from a photograph she took herself, then layered in archival imagery, family photographs, and historical references. The result links the Obamas to a wider civic and cultural lineage, from Michelle Obama’s childhood home to the carved relief on the Resolute Desk and a bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. by Charles Alston that once stood in the Oval Office during the Obama years.
Elsewhere in the Museum Building, Mark Bradford’s “City of the Big Shoulders” stretches three stories up the atrium wall, using the language of mapmaking and fragmentation to evoke Chicago as a place shaped by memory, pressure, and survival. Jeffrey Gibson’s “Yet With a Steady Beat” adds 17 circular prints that draw on drums and political buttons, with slogans including “Vote!,” “We shall overcome,” and “¡Sí se puede!”
The library’s reading room holds Aliza Nisenbaum’s “Reading Circles/ Weaving Dreams/ Seeding Futures,” a mural that pays tribute to Chicago’s literary life. On the grounds, sculptures by Martin Puryear and Allison Saar extend the program outdoors, while Rashid Johnson’s large-scale mosaic, “Broken Crowd ‘The President’s Audience,’” draws from his ongoing “Broken Men” series.
The center’s art program is notable not only for its scale, but for how deliberately it folds portraiture, abstraction, and civic memory into a single public institution. In Chicago, the Obama Presidential Center is opening as both a memorial and a living platform for contemporary art.
