The Obama Presidential Center will be dedicated Thursday on the South Side of Chicago, marking the official opening of a facility that distinguishes itself from traditional presidential libraries through its emphasis on art and community spaces.
The privately funded $850 million center sits on a 19-acre campus in Jackson Park, close to where Barack Obama lived as a young man and began his political career. The facility includes a museum housed in a distinctive 225-foot granite structure, along with a branch of the Chicago Public Library, an NBA-regulation basketball court, a recording studio and a sledding hill.
What sets the Obama Presidential Center apart is its unprecedented commissioning of original artworks. Barack and Michelle Obama selected 30 artists from diverse backgrounds to create works throughout the campus. Valerie Jarrett, chief executive of the Obama Foundation, explained the vision behind the art collection. "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," she said.
The artworks are integrated throughout the campus. Martin Puryear created a monumental sculpture titled Bending the Arc, inspired by Martin Luther King Jr.'s statement about the moral arc of the universe. Richard Hunt's Book Bird, located in the library reading garden, depicts a bird emerging from book pages to represent the transformative power of reading. This was Hunt's final work before his death in 2023.
Other notable pieces include a painted glass window by Ethiopian American artist Julie Mehretu titled Uprising of the Sun, and Mark Bradford's City of the Big Shoulders, a 38-foot-tall textured painting mapping Chicago and Lake Michigan. A mixed-media portrait of Barack and Michelle Obama by Njideka Akunyili Crosby marks the first artwork created of the two together.
The center also features the Ann Dunham Water Terrace, named for Obama's mother, which includes a stone water feature by Maya Lin. Inside the museum, Idris Khan's Sky of Hope fills the ceiling of the Nelson Mandela Sky Room with thousands of hand-stamped words from Obama's speeches honoring civil rights leaders.
Louise Bernard, the museum's founding director, noted that artists were given creative freedom. "The artists were really thinking about the Obama legacy: a sense of hopefulness, a sense of connection to place, the power of place," she said.
The Obama Presidential Center also represents a departure from other presidential libraries by divorcing itself from the National Archives and Records Administration. Rather than housing millions of physical federal documents, the center is funding their digitization while storing physical records elsewhere.
The grand opening ceremony is expected to draw prominent attendees for the official public opening after years of planning and construction.