“We want people to come constantly,” museum director Louise Bernard said of the Obama Presidential Center, describing a campus meant for walks, gatherings, performances, and simple people-watching rather than a quiet vault of presidential memorabilia.
That ambition helps explain why the center’s permanent collection reads less like a ceremonial add-on and more like part of the building’s civic argument. Spread across the 19.3-acre campus, the collection includes 28 commissioned works by internationally recognized artists, Chicago figures, and younger talents whose pieces will live in lobbies, courtyards, gardens, a library, and an athletic facility. Nearly all are placed outdoors or in spaces open to the public during operating hours, making accessibility a central design choice rather than a secondary benefit.
The strongest thread running through the collection is Chicago, especially the South Side. Sam Kirk and Dorian Sylvain’s mural “Pass It Forward”, created for the center’s Home Court, honors the neighborhoods that shaped the Obama family and frames local history as something active and shared. Theaster Gates’s installation in the Hadiya Pendleton Atrium draws on a different register, connecting community memory with civic action in a space named for the Chicago teenager whose death became a lasting symbol of loss and public grief. Richard Hunt, the late sculptor whose life and work were deeply tied to the South Side, is represented by “Book Bird,” his final work, an image of a bird emerging from an open book. Before his death, Hunt said he hoped people would see it “as something that encapsulates the progress one can make through reading and study.”
That local grounding is matched by a wider artistic language of democracy, memory, and motion. Spencer Finch’s “Memory Landscape (Nairobi, Chicago, Honolulu, Jakarta)” turns places from Barack Obama’s formative years into color, with the palette personally selected by the former president. Idris Khan’s “Sky of Hope” fills a ceiling with thousands of hand-stamped words drawn from Obama’s Selma speech, while Julie Mehretu’s exterior installation responds to the same historical tradition through layered imagery.
Carrie Mae Weems brings jazz, photography, and sound together in “The Cool Blue Wind,” linking collective memory with democratic participation. Elsewhere, Kiki Smith’s bronze “Receive,” Jack Pierson’s “HOPE,” and Aliza Nisenbaum’s library mural all shift the mood without leaving the larger theme behind: public life is built not only through institutions, but through reading, gathering, listening, and imagination.
The result is a collection that resists the usual expectations of a presidential center. Rather than placing art around history, it uses art to interpret what a presidency meant in public, cultural, and neighborhood terms. Bernard has called the project “a gift back to the South Side,” and the collection supports that claim not through monumentality alone, but through placement, access, and subject matter. Its most notable works do not isolate power.
They return again and again to the street, the library, the courtyard, the court, and the crowd. The Obama Presidential Center is scheduled to open to the public on June 19, but the larger point of its art program is already clear: the story being told there is not only about who held office, but about who gets invited into the space afterward.
