The Obama Presidential Center is opening in Chicago with original works commissioned from 30 artists, turning the $850m project into more than a museum, library and campus landmark. Visitors will move past art by Martin Puryear, Richard Hunt, Maya Lin, Julie Mehretu and Njideka Akunyili Crosby as the center opens nearly a decade after Barack Obama left office.
The scale matters because the center is not a single building but a 19-acre campus in Jackson Park, with a new branch of the Chicago Public Library, an NBA-regulation basketball court, a recording studio and a sledding hill. The art is meant to be seen in motion, across spaces that invite people to linger, talk and look again.
That is why the most striking works are also the most personal. Hunt’s Book Bird, made for the library reading garden, was his final work before his death in 2023. Lin’s Seeing Through the Universe sits at the Ann Dunham Water Terrace, Mehretu’s Uprising of the Sun covers the exterior of the museum, and Crosby’s mixed-media portrait of Barack and Michelle Obama anchors the Hope and Change Lobby. Together, they give the campus an art program that reaches from the entrance to the museum walls.
Valerie Jarrett, a senior Obama adviser, said the Obamas love art and want visitors to stand beside strangers and talk about what they are seeing. She also said none of the art makes political statements, even as the commissioned works openly engage with African American history, civil rights and Chicago’s cultural legacy. That gap between the message and the subject matter is what gives the project its force.
The center sits on Chicago's South Side close to where Obama lived as a young man and entered politics, which makes the opening more than a ribbon-cutting. Donald Trump marked 14 June by hosting UFC on the White House South Lawn for his 80th birthday, and four days later Barack Obama will unveil a monument to his own legacy on the eve of Juneteenth. The exact opening date is not the part that matters most; the point is that the Obama Presidential Center is arriving now, with a full art program designed to turn a presidential memorial into a place people will actually use.
