America’s newest presidential center and library, located in Chicago and devoted to the legacy of Barack Obama, America’s 44th president, is a heavy hitter in the art department. Opening to the public June 19, the eight-story granite museum building, designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, features major commissions by more than 30 artists, including stars such as Njideka Akunyili Crosby, whose portrait of the former First Couple has just been unveiled; it is the first official portrait of the Obamas. (They had individually commissioned portraits by Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald.)
Dominating a large atrium near the center’s entrance is a three-story-high mural by Mark Bradford in the form of a stylized aerial view-cum-topographical map of the City of the Big Shoulders. In the library, a huge mural by Aliza Nisenbaum pays tribute to some of the Windy City’s great literary figures.
There’s also a large wall installation by Jeffrey Gibson and a stained-glass window by Julie Mehretu, and on the grounds are sculptures by prominent artists like Martin Puryear and Alison Saar.
Here are five of the newest, biggest, and splashiest commissions that will greet the public when the center opens in a few days.
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Njideka Akunyili Crosby, The Obamas: Springing Forth
Image Credit: © Njideka Akunyili Crosby
Courtesy of the artist, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner. Photo: Marten ElderKnown for labor-intensive and iconographically rich portraits that take the form of photo-collage paintings, Nigerian-American artist Njideka Akunyili-Crosby, a 2017 MacArthur fellow, was tapped to create an official portrait of the First Couple. The Obamas: Springing Forth hangs in the lobby of the new Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, a public space where no ticket is required to enter. The artist unveiled the piece to the Obamas on Sunday, June 14.
Based on a photo taken by the artist, the piece weaves together archival imagery, family photo albums, and historical ephemera, and links the Obamas with generations of artists, activists and everyday US citizens who, per press materials, “helped pave their way to the White House and sustained them through two terms and into the present day.” It combines, to cite just a few examples, an image of Michelle’s childhood home, the carved relief pattern on the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, and the Martin Luther King, Jr. bust by the Harlem Renaissance artist Charles Alston that was displayed in the Oval Office during the Obama administration.
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Jeffrey Gibson, Yet With a Steady Beat
Image Credit: The Obama Foundation Jeffrey Gibson, who represented the US in the 2024 Venice Biennale, has installed Yet With a Steady Beat, which features 17 circular prints that reference two images he often engages with: drums and political buttons. Some of them bear slogans with connections to Obama’s campaigns and policies, like “Vote!”, “We shall overcome,” and “¡Sí se puede!”
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Mark Bradford, City of the Big Shoulders
Image Credit: The Obama Foundation Bradford, a 2009 MacArthur Foundation–certified “genius,” represented the US in the 2017 Venice Biennale, early during Trump’s first term. He took that opportunity to ask the question, as the New York Times noted in an interview, “How can he represent the United States abroad at a time when—as a black, gay man and a self-proclaimed ‘liberal and progressive thinker’—he no longer feels represented by his own government.” Now, he creates work for a more sympathetic venue, commissioned by a president he is more aligned with.
City of the Big Shoulders scales the three-story west wall of the atrium in the center’s Museum Building. In the center’s words, it “[maps] Chicago through an embrace of fragmentation and perspective, collapsing landscape into memory and compressing history into a story of pressure, power, survival, and hope.”
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Rashid Johnson, Broken Crowd “The President’s Audience”
Image Credit: The Obama Foundation A large-scale mosaic is drawn from Johnson’s ongoing “Broken Men” series. As the center explains, it “renders the multifaceted and complicated nature of lived experience through abstract figures whose ambiguous, wide-eyed expressions invite viewers to contemplate the universal resonance within the human condition.”
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Aliza Nisenbaum, Reading Circles/ Weaving Dreams/ Seeding Futures
Image Credit: The Obama Foundation As the center describes it, Aliza Nisenbaum’s “sweeping mural depicts moments of civic life within a public library, offering a living portrait of community in action.” Sited in the reading room of the center’s library building, the mural calls out to some recognizable street names in the Windy City as well as some of the literary figures who loom large in the city’s history. The artist, based in New York, has deep ties to the city, having earned both her BFA and MFA at the renowned School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
