‘This will be timeless’: what art can we expect from Chicago’s $850m Obama Presidential Center?
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- The Obama Presidential Center — a privately funded $850M facility on a 19-acre campus in Chicago's Jackson Park — opens nearly a decade after Obama left office, featuring 30 original artworks commissioned from diverse artists, an unprecedented scale for a presidential library.
- Notable commissions include Martin Puryear's 34-foot Bending the Arc sculpture honoring John Lewis, Julie Mehretu's 83-foot painted glass window Uprising of the Sun, Mark Bradford's 38-foot City of the Big Shoulders, and Richard Hunt's final work Book Bird (completed before his 2023 death).
- The campus includes a new Chicago Public Library branch, an NBA-regulation basketball court, a recording studio, and a sledding hill — built because a young Michelle Obama never had one growing up on Chicago's famously flat South Side.
- The center broke from presidential library tradition by divorcing itself from the National Archives and Records Administration, leaving millions of physical federal documents in a Maryland warehouse and funding their digitization instead.
- The museum pointedly avoids mentioning Trump by name despite chronicling his dismantling of Obama-era achievements like the Paris climate agreement, Iran nuclear deal, and Cuba normalization — and Trump was not invited to Thursday's grand opening ceremony.
- Biden, Obama's vice president for eight years, also receives short shrift in the displays, a detail the article's dominant Obama-vs.-Trump framing tends to overshadow.
- Admission costs $30 and visitors can see personal artifacts including Obama's mother's woven wall hanging from her pregnancy, his grandfather Hussein Obama's 1940s Kenyan passbook, his Occidental College essay on Shakespeare's tragic heroes, and the Bible used for both Lincoln's and Obama's inaugurations.
Why it matters: The $850M center's 30-artist commission and 19-acre campus set a new template for presidential libraries, with the Obamas curating a legacy of art and civic engagement that contrasts sharply with Trump's cultural demolition. The pointed omission of both Trump and Biden from the displays reveals how the Obama team is deliberately shaping a political counter-narrative, while the $30 admission makes it a commercial destination anchored on Chicago's South Side.
