The Obama Presidential Center is an actual art museum
Plus: This year’s U.S. Soccer’s World Cup kits reimagine the Stars and Stripes
The Obama Presidential Center, which opens to the public on Juneteenth, is a presidential library unlike any other, complete with an extensive art collection that former First Lady Michelle Obama said at the opening today she hopes visitors will “be inspired by.” The art also says something important about what the former first couple hope for the new center.
The museum includes 28 commissioned works of art that were curated by a former chief curator of art in U.S. embassies for the State Department, Virginia Shore. What started as “five or six artists” grew, according to Obama Presidential Center Museum founding director Louise Bernard, and the goal was to curate “not only established artists but emerging ones, a strong Chicago representation, and an international dynamic” and include “race, ethnicity, and queer representation,” Bernard told Galerie Magazine.
Julie Mehretu’s “Uprising of the Sun” is the painted window on the outside of the building, and it’s inspired by Obama’s speech at Selma for the 50th anniversary of the march there, the same speech that’s rendered in text on the facade titled “You Are America.” In the museum’s main lobby, “The Obamas: Springing Forth” by Njideka Akunyili Crosby is the first joint portrait of former President Barack Obama and his wife together. Mark Bradford’s “City of the Big Shoulders” (below) is a three-story map of Chicago.
For an art collection at a center named after a president known for his oratory, there’s a number of text-based works. Jenny Holzer “Freedom Riders” uses FBI files on the Freedom Riders, civil rights activists who faced violence when they challenged segregation, while Jack Pierson’s sculpture “Hope” (below) is made from found letters to spell out a theme of Obama’s campaigns. At a top floor space facing the window behind the building’s outer text, Idris Khan’s “Sky of Hope” is made from text of Obama praising Civil Rights leaders on the ceiling.
Nekisha Durrett’s “Hem of Heaven,” a sculpture made of ceramic tiles, is inspired by Harriet Tubman’s shawl, and “Book Bird,” a sculpture in the library garden, is sculptor Richard Hunt’s final work. The center’s artwork also includes wooden benches by Norman Teague and a stone sculptural water feature by Maya Lin. “Bending the Arc,” an arch sculpture by Martin Puryear in the John Lewis Plaza, is a reminder that the moral universe does not bend toward justice by itself.
Obama said as president that the arts “have always been central to the American experience.”
“They provoke thought, challenge our assumptions, and shape how we define our narrative as a country,” he said in 2018.
By curating artworks commissioned to convey optimistic themes from diverse viewpoints, the Obama center’s art is defining its own narrative about the country as a multiracial democracy that we build together. It also reinforces the center’s larger mission to inspire and empower now, not just look back. Rather than art as history, it’s a contemporary collection. Yes, we still can.
This year’s U.S. Soccer’s World Cup kits reimagine the Stars and Stripes
