Obama Presidential Center Announces Final Cohort Of Commissions

The Obama Presidential Center in Chicago has completed the artistic framework for its South Side campus with a final round of eight commissions, bringing the total number of new works to 30. When the center opens in June, the 19.3-acre site will feature contributions from Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Jeffrey Gibson, Rashid Johnson, Hugo McCloud, Martin Puryear, Lorna Simpson, and Norman Teague.

The new commissions extend across portraiture, sculpture, installation, and design, with several works directly addressing Barack and Michelle Obama. Crosby is creating a portrait of the former president and first lady for the Main Hall. According to the center, the work will incorporate archival imagery, family albums, historical ephemera, and cultural touchstones, placing private memory and public history in the same frame.

Gibson's contribution takes a different route. The artist has produced a suite of 17 prints that reference political buttons from the Obama campaigns, translating campaign ephemera into a more sustained visual language. Elsewhere on the campus, Campos-Pons's Still Holding the Scent of Flowers will be installed near the museum's Oval Office exhibit and will re-create the now-destroyed White House Rose Garden. McCloud's Hidden Reflection will appear in the private dining room and depict locations significant to the former president.

The commissions also widen the center's historical reach. Puryear's Bending the Arc honors the late civil rights activist and congressman John Lewis through a 34-foot-long beam that the artist hand-carved in wood before it was 3D-scanned and fabricated in stainless steel. Teague has created eight wooden benches to be distributed throughout the museum, folding functional design into the visitor experience. Johnson and Simpson, meanwhile, are contributing new works within ongoing series, including one of Johnson's“Broken Men” mosaics for the teaching kitchen and a Simpson icescape for the seminar room in the private presidential suite.

The eight artists join 22 previously announced participants, among them Carrie Mae Weems, Julie Mehretu, Mark Bradford, Theaster Gates, and the late Richard Hunt. In a statement, Obama Foundation CEO Valerie Jarrett said the center was imagined as a place where art would deepen curiosity and inspiration, while museum founding director Louise Bernard described the commissions as part of a“vibrant artistic legacy” rooted in openness, engagement, and respect for diverse stories.

Taken together, the program positions the Obama Presidential Center as more than an institutional archive. It is being built as a civic landscape in which contemporary art, public memory, and everyday use are deliberately intertwined.

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