The Audacity of Art at the Obama Presidential Center
By Robin Pogrebin, The New York times
Barack and Michelle Obama commissioned 30 artists to create work for their campus, which starts visitor previews next week on the South Side of Chicago.
Yes, there will be the more predictable elements: a full-scale model of the Oval Office, videos of election nights and mannequins wearing the first lady’s dresses.
But the Obama Presidential Center, which officially opens on the South Side of Chicago in June, will also have a feature rarely — if ever — prominent in past presidential libraries: original works by 30 artists that were commissioned by Barack and Michelle Obama.
The decision to make art a priority in President Barack Obama’s privately funded, $850 million project for posterity is consistent with the Obamas’ longstanding commitment to the arts over two administrations. During those terms, the first couple centered artists like Alma Thomas, whose 1966 canvas “Resurrection” was the first painting by an African American woman to enter the White House Collection, along with Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald, who painted the Obamas’ National Portrait Gallery portraits.
“Michelle and I wanted the Obama Presidential Center to be more than a library or a museum,” Obama said in a statement to The New York Times. “We wanted it to be an important cultural institution for Chicago and the South Side, a place that belonged to the community. Art was central to that.”
“When you commission work from artists like Richard Hunt or Julie Mehretu or any of the 28 others who contributed to this campus, you’re trusting their singular vision,” the statement continued. “But each of them, in their own way, is wrestling with the questions this Center is built around: where we come from, how we got here, what kind of future we can imagine for ourselves and our communities.”
The art commissions are one of several unconventional aspects of the Obama Center, designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien Architects, which starts visitor previews on May 4.
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