The Obama Presidential Center has commissioned new site-specific works by the artists Spencer Finch and Lindsay Adams for buildings on its 19-acre campus, located in the Woodlawn neighbourhood on Chicago’s South Side. Scheduled to open in the first half of 2026, the centre will include more than 20 commissioned artworks, most of which will be in spaces that are free and open to the public.
Finch, known for his immersive installations that explore colour and memory, will create an installation of wall tiles that invokes the palettes of four cities—Honolulu, Nairobi, Jakarta and Chicago itself—that were formative to former US president Barack Obama’s development. The commission from the Chicago-based painter Adams, an installation reimagining one of her gestural, gem-coloured abstract paintings, is titled Weary Blues after the Langston Hughes poem of the same name.
Previously announced commissions for the centre include a garden with a Maya Lin-designed fountain, a monumental sculpture by the Chicago artist Richard Hunt and an 83ft-tall stained glass window in the museum building’s façade by Julie Mehretu, which stretches vertically along much of the granite-clad tower.
The centre “will be an arts destination in its own right”, says Louise Bernard, the director of the Obama Presidential Center Museum. “I think that may be unexpected for many people when they think about presidential libraries and museums, that art would be such a central focus.”
She points to the enduring importance of the arts to the former First Couple, from their work with artists in the White House to acquiring new pieces for its permanent collection, including an Alma Thomas painting, the first acquisition by a Black woman artist, which took pride of place in the White House dining room.
Key to the centre’s curatorial vision, Bernard says, is to feature both emerging and established artists, and to strike a balance between works that have local, national and international roots. Bernard was connected to both Finch and Adams by Virginia Shore, the centre’s commissioning curator, who previously served as the director of the Art in Embassies programme.
Lindsay Adams Photo by lan Vecchiotti. Courtesy of the artist and Patron
When she first encountered paintings by Adams—who is from Washington, DC and currently completing her MFA at School of the Art Institute of Chicago—Bernard recalls being “struck by the bold nature of her abstraction [and] the powerful sense of her connection to colour”, as well as by “how much power and potential she has as a young artist working today”. For the commission, Adams will translate her 2024 painting Weary Blues into silkscreened panels on fabric, which will be installed in the public cafe area at the centre.
“I hope that [viewers] can feel the movement of the colour and the mood and just sit with it, because my work can often serve as a place of meditation and reflection,” Adams says. The piece is an exploration of “memory and imagination, and what place and home might feel like”, she adds.
The commissions also offer opportunities for artists to explore working in media that are new to them, Bernard says. Adams, who described herself as a “very traditional painter”, had not previously used screenprinting in her work. The façade commission was also the first time that Mehretu, who is known for many-layered abstract paintings, worked in glass.
Lindsay Adams, Weary Blues, 2024 Courtesy the Artist
Finch’s piece was inspired by the former president’s 1995 memoir, Dreams of My Father. “The building, the whole centre, is so much about the president and his relationship to Chicago and the world, that I really wanted it to be connected to him,” the artist says.
Finch has previously used colour to invoke a monumental sense of time and place. His commission for the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York, Trying to Remember the Color of the Sky on That September Morning, is an installation of 2,983 tiles, each one representing a victim of the 2001 and 1993 attacks and the brilliant blue of the sky on 11 September 2001. For his commission at the Obama Presidential Center, Finch created sets of colour swatches that reference descriptions of Honolulu, Nairobi, Jakarta and Chicago and sent these to Obama, who made the final selection himself. The nearly 70ft-long tiled mural will be installed in the lower level lobby of the campus’s Forum building, which will include an auditorium and restaurant.
In addition to the Forum and the Museum buildings, the campus will also include a new branch of the Chicago Public Library, partially underground and topped with a walkable green roof; an athletic facility with a full-sized basketball court, training and wellness areas; and outdoor and green spaces with plazas, walking paths and a vegetable garden.
Since 2015, when the nearby University of Chicago won the bid to serve as an institutional partner for the centre, the project has been met with concern by some longtime residents and elected officials, who fear the project could lead to displacement in the predominantly Black neighbourhoods of Woodlawn and South Shore, where Michelle Obama grew up.
