When the Obama Presidential Center (OPC) opens on June 19, the 19.3-acre campus, located in Chicago’s Jackson Park, will feature an arts program on a scale to rival many contemporary art institutions.

In all, over 28 site-specific artworks by 30 artists will shape the center, including a vertiginous window by Julie Mehretu, an enormous painted map of Chicago’s South Side by Mark Bradford, and an arcing outdoor metal sculpture by Martin Puryear that takes inspiration from Martin Luther King Jr. Together, they form an ambitious, permanent collection of public artworks that puts some of the most important living artists in dialogue with both emerging and globally recognized artists from Chicago.

As the ‘living legacy’ of the Obama White House, art is vital to the center’s mission. ‘We began with a relatively small program of commissioned artworks – about five or six – but over time, we started to see that we really had an opportunity to engage in a very architectural and site-specific way,’ Dr. Louise Bernard, director of the Obama Presidential Center Museum, tells me. Indeed, the program has grown exponentially, under the leadership of curator Virginia Shore, who previously helmed the country’s Art in Embassies program.

Bernard hopes the artistic program will help redefine what a presidential center can be, and for it to act as a connecting hub for other cultural institutions, from Theaster Gates’s nearby Stony Island Arts Bank to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago further north.

‘Not everyone thinks of themselves as a museum-goer,’ she explained. ‘It can feel intimidating, and I’m hopeful that a project like ours – and the work that other institutions are doing – helps to break down that threshold.’

Art Basel spoke to five commissioned artists about their works at the Obama Presidential Center – and the influence the new organization could have on Chicago and US museums more broadly.

Theaster Gates

Chicago-based Theaster Gates has created a sweeping installation for the center that features images of Black beauty and youth from Ebony and Jet magazines from within his archive.

‘It was extremely thoughtful of the Obama Presidential Center team to think seriously about the role that art plays in storytelling in America,’ Gates said. ‘There are moments when facts are just not enough and you need emotional power. The artists represented in the space help us touch the truth.’

Gates believes the center will contribute to making Chicago into ‘a true third coast’ and will have an impact on both a local and national level at a moment when such its need is keenly felt.

‘The way that the Obama Presidential Center will read as a museum is yet to be seen, but it is clear that institutions that are only reflective and not action-oriented will prove themselves to be less important,’ he expands. ‘We are in a time where fortunately or unfortunately, we need our institutions to do more. Between the ongoing research, the fellows, and the intention for community engagement, OPC is positioned to generate new knowledge, new political thought, and a rededication to the project of human dignity and democracy.’

Kiki Smith

Kiki Smith has created the largest bronze to date from her ‘Moon & Stars’ series for the center. For her the permanence of each artwork is what makes the program stand out, benefitting both artists and the generations of Chicagoans who will encounter the works.

‘It’s a very rare thing for artists to have such an opportunity. At best one’s artwork is bought and put someplace, but to have something from the beginning that is intricately woven into the space, within a larger grouping of work, that’s a unique situation,’ she said.

‘People will have the ability to develop a relationship with the work that’s there,’ she adds. ‘In museums, there’s very little stability. Things are momentary – there for two months, six months, or a year or so, but if something is commissioned to be in a space, hopefully it will have a life that young people can follow through their own development.’

Julie Mehretu

On the building’s north side, Julie Mehretu’s 83-foot-tall vertical window layers in its bold and vibrant abstract composition a number of historical and artistic references, as well as President Obama’s famed remarks in Selma, Alabama in 2015.

Mehretu believes that the center will occupy a unique space both in Chicago and nationally, interweaving political and social history with a range of cultural programs.

‘The art program is as ambitious as the whole project – to create not just a presidential library as a resource for your legacy and your papers, but really build an institution that is committed to the kind of processual work that is required for political change and for leadership, and to offer possibilities to new generations,’ she said. ‘And to do that not just in the space of politics, but history, art, culture, music, sports, literature, nutrition. All of this is part of the bigger vision of the project, and that becomes a very, very different kind of cultural center and institution.’

Nick Cave

The center has created opportunities for first-time collaborations, including between the Chicago-based artist Nick Cave and Portland-based artist Marie Watt who have worked together on a two-story-high beaded tapestry that blends Cave’s notions of topography and migration with Watt’s honoring of Indigenous cultural traditions.

‘It’s an incredible group of artists that all understand the gravity of this commission and the indelible mark of this president,’ said Cave. The OPC is a new marker of excellence for a presidential library, museum, and community space – it joins the list of so many inventions to come out of Chicago and builds on this legacy of creativity in an extraordinary way.’

Cave believes the center ‘challenges the expectations’ of what a museum can be and becomes ‘a communal “what will be.”’ He hopes that this can be seen in his and Watt’s work, and ‘that visitors leave feeling our human interconnectedness.’

María Magdalena Campos-Pons

María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s vibrant tribute to the White House Rose Garden is a burst of flora representing what she describes as ‘a firework of diversities.’ It has become a memorial of sorts, too, as the Trump administration has paved over most of the historic garden.

‘With this many commissions, it is a clear message that art is fundamental to maintaining a healthy society, as a tool for education, and for unifying and celebrating diversity of traditions, viewpoints, and concepts,’ explains Campos-Pons. ‘It sends such a strong message that art matters. Art is the representation and the materialization of the human soul and the human spirit. It is what makes us human.’

She called the presidential library another ‘beautiful gesture of art-making’ to come out of Chicago, adding that: ‘The city has long been a fertile ground for some remarkable rethinking of arts and social engagement.’