Obama Presidential Center unveils 30 commissioned artists in Chicago
Barack and Michelle Obama commissioned original works by 30 artists for the obama presidential center on Chicago’s South Side. The privately funded $850 million campus opens nearly a decade after Barack Obama left office, bringing a new art collection into the center’s first public presentation.
Valerie Jarrett said the aim is to create a place where visitors pause together in front of the work. “We want people who come here to look at a piece of art, stand next to a stranger, have a conversation about that piece of art and how it touches them each in their own individual ways.”
Chicago’s Jackson Park campus
The center sits on 19 acres in Jackson Park and includes a new branch of the Chicago Public Library, an NBA-regulation basketball court, a recording studio and a sledding hill built because Michelle Obama never had one growing up on the South Side. Those features place the art inside a campus built for more than one use, not only for exhibition.
Barack Obama is set to unveil the center on the eve of Juneteenth, giving the opening a fixed point on the calendar as the project moves from construction to public access. The site’s size and mix of facilities make the art part of a larger civic opening, not a standalone gallery installation.
Art in the Obama Center
The commissions include Martin Puryear’s sculpture Bending the Arc in the John Lewis Plaza, Richard Hunt’s Book Bird in the library reading garden, Maya Lin’s stone water feature Seeing Through the Universe for the Ann Dunham Water Terrace, Julie Mehretu’s Uprising of the Sun, an 83-foot-tall painted glass window on the museum exterior, and Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s mixed-media portrait of Barack and Michelle Obama in the Hope and Change Lobby.
Jarrett said, “None of the art makes political statements.” She also said the Obamas approached White House curation with the same outlook: “They love art,” she said.
Book Bird and Bending the Arc
Richard Hunt’s Book Bird carries added weight because it was his final work before his death in 2023. Puryear tied his piece to a line that has long been associated with moral change: “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” he said.
The opening gives Chicago a new presidential site with library, recreation and gathering space built around commissioned art rather than a single monument. Visitors will be seeing works that were made for this campus alone, and several of them are tied to specific spaces that shape how the public moves through the building from the plaza to the library garden to the museum exterior.
