‘This will be timeless’: what art can we expect from Chicago’s $850m Obama Presidential Center?
The Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, a privately funded $850 million project opening nearly a decade after Barack Obama left office, features original commissions from 30 diverse artists—a scale unprecedented for a presidential library. Works include Martin Puryear's sculpture "Bending the Arc," Richard Hunt's "Book Bird," Maya Lin's "Seeing Through the Universe," Julie Mehretu's stained-glass window "Uprising of the Sun," and a joint piece by Nick Cave and Marie Watt, among others. The center, located on a 19-acre campus in Jackson Park, also houses a public library branch, a basketball court, a recording studio, and a sledding hill.