Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s Portrait Leads Art-Filled Opening of Obama Presidential Center

The first official portrait of Barack and Michelle Obama together was revealed last week, ahead of the opening of the Obama Presidential Center, a museum, library and education centre in Chicago. The painting, by Nigerian-born, Los Angeles-based artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby, places the former president and first lady within a domestic interior surrounded by books and plants.

The work was among the final commissions to be unveiled before the centre opened on 19 June—Juneteenth—the federal holiday commemorating the emancipation of enslaved African Americans. The centre, a 7.7-hectare (19-acre) campus which also houses athletic facilities, gardens and public gathering spaces (much of which is freely accessible to the public), is situated in Chicago’s historic Jackson Park. More than a decade in the making, the project evolved from a presidential archive into a cultural destination. 

Since plans for the campus were first announced in 2015, 28 site-specific commissions have gradually been revealed across the centre’s halls, atriums, courtyards and gardens. Together they trace intertwined histories of Chicago, the civil rights movement and the ongoing struggle for racial equality in the United States.

In Crosby’s painting, a window behind the Obamas shows the modest Chicago home where Michelle Obama grew up. Family photographs sit in the background of the composition, in Crosby’s signature collage-like style, while a bust of Martin Luther King Jr, which sat in the Oval Office during Obama’s tenure, sits in a corner, linking the pair to a larger history of Black American history.

On the museum building’s north façade is Ethiopian-American artist Julie Mehretu’s Uprising of the Sun (2024), a luminous 25-metre painted window. For the piece, Mehretu drew inspiration from Barack Obama’s 2015 speech in Selma, Alabama, marking the 50th anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery marches, during which Black Americans protested against the blocking of their right to vote. Painted on to the glass are references including the Selma marches, speeches by civil rights leader John Lewis and Obama, the 19th-century painter Robert S Duncanson and Jacob Lawrence’s landmark Migration Series (1940–1941).

Inside the museum, Mark Bradford’s City of the Big Shoulders (2026) takes its title from American poet Carl Sandburg’s nickname for Chicago. Spanning a three-storey wall, the work maps the city, featuring streets in bright yellow, dense neighbourhoods and the blues of Lake Michigan. 

The commissions also reflect the Obamas’ longstanding commitment to Chicago’s cultural community. Throughout their time in the White House, the couple frequently highlighted artists from their adopted hometown, and that emphasis continues throughout the centre. Chicago-born artist Theaster Gates has created an installation incorporating archival material from Ebony and Jet magazines; nearby stands Book Bird (2023), a bronze sculpture by the late Chicago-born artist Richard Hunt, depicting a bird about to take flight from a book. Completed shortly before Hunt’s death in 2023, it is one of the sculptor’s final works.