When the Obama Presidential Center opens its doors on Chicago’s South Side, visitors will encounter more than a museum dedicated to the legacy of the United States’ first African American president. They will enter a cultural institution shaped by artists from across the world, including two of the most influential contemporary artists of African origin: Ethiopian-American artist Julie Mehretu and Nigerian-American artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby.
Their commissions stand among the most significant artworks within the Center, not only because of their scale and prominence, but because they embody many of the ideas that define Barack and Michelle Obama’s public life: migration, collective memory, civic participation, resilience, and the ongoing pursuit of social change.
At a moment when questions surrounding identity, democracy, and belonging continue to define public discourse in the United States and beyond, the inclusion of Mehretu and Crosby signals something larger. It places African artistic voices at the very center of one of America’s most important new civic and cultural institutions.
Julie Mehretu’s Monumental Meditation on History and Change
Perhaps no artwork at the Obama Presidential Center is more immediately visible than Uprising of the Sun, Julie Mehretu’s monumental painted-glass installation that rises dramatically across the north façade of the Museum Building. Towering at an extraordinary 83 feet high and 25 feet wide, the work occupies one of the most prominent architectural positions on the entire campus, ensuring that visitors encounter it even before entering the museum itself. Comprised of 35 painted glass panels, the installation represents Mehretu’s first major work in glass and one of the most ambitious public commissions of her career.
Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1970, Mehretu left the country with her family following the Ethiopian Revolution and was raised in the United States. Over the past three decades, she has emerged as one of the world’s most influential contemporary artists, celebrated for expansive abstract compositions that layer architectural drawings, maps, political histories, migration routes, and gestural mark-making into dense visual landscapes. Her works are held in the collections of major institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Tate, and the Centre Pompidou, while her monumental commissions have transformed public spaces around the world.
For the Obama Presidential Center, Mehretu created a work that is both architectural and deeply political. Uprising of the Sun was inspired directly by President Barack Obama’s speech marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches in 2015, particularly his reflections on how social change occurs through collective action and sustained struggle. According to the artist, the work began with imagery of President Obama and the late civil rights icon John Lewis crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge during the anniversary commemoration in Selma, Alabama. Rather than reproducing this historic scene literally, Mehretu transformed it into a complex visual meditation on democracy, memory, and transformation.
The installation translates Mehretu’s signature visual language into glass through an intricate process involving hand-painting, airbrushing, masking, and the use of melted ceramic pigments fused onto the glass surface. The resulting composition is alive with movement: sweeping gestures, bursts of colour, layered abstractions, and shifting transparencies create an image that appears to transform throughout the day as natural light moves across and through the building. From the exterior, Uprising of the Sun functions as a luminous beacon embedded within the granite tower. From inside the Museum, visitors experience the work differently, with sunlight filtering through the coloured glass and casting changing patterns across the interior spaces.
The work functions both physically and metaphorically. Visitors encounter overlapping forms, multiple perspectives, and shifting transparencies that reveal themselves differently depending on movement, position, and time of day. In doing so, Mehretu transforms the very act of looking into an exercise in historical reflection.
The piece suggests that democratic progress is never linear. Change emerges through overlapping struggles, accumulated actions, and generations of collective effort. This philosophy echoes Obama’s own understanding of civic engagement: that social transformation occurs not through singular moments, but through sustained participation over time. As Mehretu herself has noted, she sought to create a work that encourages people to think through layers of places, histories, and experiences, mirroring the ways in which societies continually remake themselves.
Placed on the exterior of the Museum, Uprising of the Sun effectively becomes a public threshold. Before visitors enter the institution, they are already invited to consider how histories are layered, how movements are built, and how individuals become part of larger narratives of change. The installation also establishes a visual dialogue with the Museum’s architecture, a 225-foot granite tower inscribed with excerpts from Obama’s historic “You Are America” speech delivered in Selma. Together, architecture, language, and art create one of the most powerful civic spaces in contemporary American museum design.
For an institution dedicated to democracy and civic action, Mehretu’s work offers an especially powerful proposition: that history must be continually revisited, reinterpreted, and actively seen. More than a monumental artwork, Uprising of the Sun stands as a luminous testament to the unfinished project of democracy itself.
Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s Portrait of a Presidency
While Mehretu’s commission addresses collective history on a monumental scale, Nigerian-born artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby turns inward, creating an intimate yet expansive portrait of Barack and Michelle Obama.
Crosby’s commission occupies a place of exceptional significance within the Center. Her work is the first portrait to depict President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama together.
Born in Enugu, Nigeria, Crosby moved to the United States in her late teens and has built an internationally acclaimed practice exploring migration, cultural hybridity, family history, and the complexities of diasporic identity. Her richly layered works combine painting, drawing, photography, collage, and image transfer techniques to construct visual worlds where personal memory intersects with national and global histories.
For the Obama Presidential Center, Crosby created a densely layered portrait that weaves together archival materials, family photographs, historical references, and cultural touchstones.
Rather than producing a conventional presidential portrait, Crosby constructs an expansive visual narrative around the Obamas and the communities, histories, and struggles that made their presidency possible.
The artwork situates Barack and Michelle Obama within a broader continuum of artists, activists, organizers, citizens, and leaders whose collective efforts paved the way for their historic ascent to the White House. In doing so, Crosby challenges the traditional language of presidential portraiture, shifting attention away from individual achievement toward interconnected histories and shared struggles.
This approach is deeply consistent with Crosby’s wider artistic practice. Throughout her career, she has explored the experience of living between cultures, often combining Nigerian and American visual references within the same composition. At the Obama Presidential Center, that layered methodology becomes a powerful metaphor for the Obamas themselves, figures whose identities and political journeys transcend singular narratives of race, nationality, and belonging.
The result is both personal and political: a portrait not simply of two individuals, but of an evolving American story.
A Broader African and Diasporic Presence
Beyond Mehretu and Crosby, the Center also includes works by artists whose practices expand the meaning of African and diasporic presence within the institution.
María Magdalena Campos-Pons, a Cuban-born artist of Afro-Cuban heritage, contributes Still Holding the Scent of Flowers, a mixed-media interpretation of the White House Rose Garden. The installation weaves together roses, tulips, magnolias, herbs, fruits, and vegetables into a meditation on memory, renewal, diversity, and hope. Campos-Pons’ practice is profoundly informed by Yoruba spiritual and cultural traditions that travelled from West Africa to Cuba through the transatlantic slave trade. Descended from Nigerians brought to Cuba during slavery, the artist has long explored ancestry, ritual, migration, and memory in her work. At the Obama Presidential Center, her commission introduces a distinctly Afro-diasporic perspective, connecting Michelle Obama’s legacy to broader histories of care, cultivation, and cultural survival.
The wider commission programme also features several major African American artists whose works deepen the Center’s engagement with Black history and civic struggle. Carrie Mae Weems contributes The Cool Blue Wind, a photographic collage accompanied by original music that reflects on Obama’s 2008 election, jazz traditions, and collective memory. Mark Bradford’s monumental painting City of the Big Shoulders transforms Chicago into a layered landscape of history, power, survival, and hope.
Theaster Gates, one of Chicago’s most influential contemporary artists, created To See What They Could See in honour of Hadiya Pendleton, reflecting on community resilience and civic action. Rashid Johnson’s Broken Men explores the complexity of human experience through large-scale mosaic and abstraction, while Lorna Simpson’s Durative continues her longstanding investigations into image, landscape, race, and memory through atmospheric depictions of glacial landscapes.
Nick Cave, collaborating with Native American artist Marie Watt, contributes This Land, Shared Sky, a multimedia textile installation that creates a powerful dialogue between Black and Indigenous histories and traditions. Elsewhere in the Center, artists including Alison Saar, Richard Hunt, Norman Teague, Tyanna J. Buie, and Dorian Sylvain further extend the institution’s commitment to representing the breadth and richness of African diasporic artistic practices.
African Perspectives at the Heart of an American Institution
The presence of Mehretu and Crosby within the Obama Presidential Center reflects a broader reimagining of who shapes national memory and how those stories are told.
Presidential libraries and museums have historically relied upon conventional commemorative forms. The Obama Presidential Center instead embraces contemporary artistic practices that foreground multiplicity, complexity, and diverse lived experiences.
Through Mehretu’s meditation on historical struggle and Crosby’s layered portrait of identity and collective memory, African perspectives become integral to the Center’s narrative architecture.
Their works demonstrate that the story of America cannot be separated from histories of migration, diaspora, and global interconnectedness. They also affirm the increasingly central role African artists play within contemporary international culture.
Together, these works make clear that African presence at the Obama Presidential Center is not limited to geography. It moves through Ethiopia, Nigeria, Cuba, the Caribbean, and Black America. It appears through abstraction, portraiture, collage, sculpture, installation, textile, sound, and architecture. In that sense, the Center becomes more than a site of presidential memory; it becomes a space where African and African diasporic artists help define how democracy, history, and belonging are seen.
The prominence of Julie Mehretu and Njideka Akunyili Crosby remains especially significant because both are African-born artists whose works occupy central symbolic positions in the Center. Mehretu transforms the Museum’s exterior into a layered meditation on struggle and progress, while Crosby gives the Obamas a portrait rooted in family, archive, migration, and collective memory. Around them, artists such as María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Carrie Mae Weems, Mark Bradford, Theaster Gates, Rashid Johnson, Lorna Simpson, and Nick Cave extend the story into the wider African diaspora.
In the end, the Obama Presidential Center’s art programme demonstrates that the legacy of America’s first Black president cannot be told through a narrow national frame. It is a story shaped by Chicago, by the American South, by Africa, by the Caribbean, and by diasporic histories that continue to transform the meaning of freedom and citizenship.
Through these commissions, African and African-descended artists do more than decorate the Center; they help build its emotional, historical, and cultural foundation. In doing so, they ensure that the Obama Presidential Center stands not only as a monument to a presidency, but also as a testament to the global histories, migrations, and cultural exchanges that continue to shape contemporary America.
