Njideka Akunyili Crosby – The Obamas: Springing Forth, 2026. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner View image in fullscreen Njideka Akunyili Crosby – The Obamas: Springing Forth, 2026. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner Art ‘This will be timeless’: what art can we expect from Chicago’s $850m Obama Presidential Center? Original works by 30 artists have been commissioned by the Obamas alongside vital pieces of memorabilia for visitors to appreciate
David Smith in Chicago Tue 16 Jun 2026 12.00 CEST Last modified on Tue 16 Jun 2026 14.53 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google I t is a tale of two presidents. On 14 June Donald Trump celebrated his 80th birthday by hosting a raucous crowd for Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) on the White House South Lawn. Four days later, on the eve of Juneteenth, Barack Obama will unveil a monument to his legacy that honours the audacity of art .
Read more For the Obama Presidential Center on the South Side of Chicago, Barack and Michelle Obama commissioned original works by 30 artists from diverse backgrounds, a bold move never seen at such scale at a presidential library. It also forms a quiet rebuke of Obama’s successor, who has filled the Oval Office with stiff presidential portraits while plotting the demise of cultural stalwarts such as the Kennedy Center and Smithsonian Institution.
“They love art,” said Valerie Jarrett , chief executive of the Obama Foundation, reflecting on how the Obamas took a similarly inclusive approach to curating the White House. “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. ”
The privately funded $850m presidential centre , opening nearly a decade after Obama left office, sits on a 19-acre campus in Chicago’s Jackson Park, close to where he lived as a young man and entered politics. It includes a new branch of the Chicago Public Library, an NBA-regulation basketball court, a recording studio and a sledding hill built because a young Michelle Obama never had one growing up on the city’s famously flat South Side.
The new artworks are dotted throughout. Jarrett insisted: “None of the art makes political statements.” But that depends on the definition of “political”. It does engage with the roots of African American history, the struggle for civil rights and the specific cultural legacy of Chicago .
View image in fullscreen Barack Obama walks through the museum. Photograph: Christopher Dilts/The Obama Foundation Martin Puryear’s monumental sculpture Bending the Arc is inspired by Martin Luther King’s celebrated line, “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” and pays homage to John Lewis for carrying it forward. Puryear hand carved a straight, 34-ft-long wooden beam, which was then 3D scanned, enlarged and curved digitally, before reaching its final form in stainless steel in the John Lewis Plaza.
Richard Hunt’s Book Bird, located in the library reading garden, depicts a bird bursting from the pages of a book to evoke the emancipatory power of reading. Hunt was steeped in the civil rights movement and Chicago’s South Side. This was his final work before his death in 2023.
The Ann Dunham Water Terrace – named for the president’s mother – features a stone water feature by Maya Lin , titled Seeing Through the Universe, comprising an upright oculus that emits mist and a flat “pebble” that cascades with water.
Towering above it all is the museum, a 225-ft granite-covered monolith that has already been dubbed the Eye of Sauron, a Klingon prison and the “Obamalisk”. On the exterior, the Ethiopian-American artist Julie Mehretu has created Uprising of the Sun, a mesmerising 83-ft-tall painted glass window inspired by Obama’s remarks at the 50th anniversary of the marches from Selma to Montgomery.
In the Hope and Change Lobby, Nigerian-American artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby offers a mixed-media portrait of Barack and Michelle Obama – the first created of them together – that draws on archival imagery, family albums and historical ephemera. Nick Cave and Marie Watt join forces on a multimedia textile piece that brings together Indigenous and Black traditions through beaded nets and sculptural jingle elements.
View image in fullscreen Uprising of the Sun by Julie Mehretu. Photograph: Christopher Dilts/The Obama Foundation Mark Bradford’s City of the Big Shoulders is a 38-ft-tall textured painting that envelops the three-storey west wall of the museum’s Our Story atrium, mapping Chicago and Lake Michigan with dazzling detail in a riot of colours and scrappy materials. On the white pyramid-shaped ceiling of the Nelson Mandela Sky Room, Idris Khan’s Sky of Hope overlaps thousands of hand-stamped words pulled from Obama’s speeches honouring civil rights leaders in a burst of textual colour.
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