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Here’s How the Obama Presidential Center Is Different from Other Presidents’ Museums
More than a library and archives, the new Chicago institution is a place for the community to gather, talk and play together
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“In 2007, I was proud of my hands,” wrote Bobby Ingram, an unemployed land surveyor from Mississippi in a 2009 letter to President Barack Obama. He lovingly described familiar scrapes and callouses. “I miss my career and my old hands. I kneel nights and clutch new hands together, praying we all can recover what seems lost.”
The letter, on lined, three-hole-punched paper, is part of an exhibit on the ten letters from constituents that the president was known to read each night to stay in touch with the concerns and struggles of American citizens.
Depicting Obama as an empathetic representative of the people, the letter is among many storytelling objects on display at the sprawling Obama Presidential Center, which will open in Chicago on June 19. The addition to the city’s South Side pays homage to Obama, as does a 225-foot-tall tower surrounded by a 19-acre park where locals and visitors can picnic and play.
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Barack and Michelle Obama have stressed the importance of the center’s neighborhood, where Michelle grew up and Barack got his political start as a community organizer. The $850-million center is poised to draw a million visitors a year to the new Jackson Park landmark, which neighbors the University of Chicago.
From its architecture to its art collection and exhibitions that urge citizens to civic action, the center was built with “a hope that people will come here and not just passively engage but be inspired and motivated to do their part to make the world a better place,” says Valerie Jarrett, former White House adviser and the chief executive officer of the Obama Foundation, the nonprofit that built the center.
Just don’t call it a library. With a full-size basketball court, and conspicuously without any presidential paper documents, the center, in many ways, is a departure from presidential institutions that came before.
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In addition to a museum honoring a president’s legacy, a traditional presidential library—such as the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York, and the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas—houses actual papers that attest to a president’s work. But Obama administrators assert that he was the first digital president—1.5 billion pages of records, such as emails, originated digitally—making a paper treasury superfluous to Obama’s center.
“You shouldn’t have to physically come to the center in order to look at all of his papers,” says Jarrett.
The Barack Obama Presidential Library in College Park, Maryland, is part of the National Archives and Records Administration. It does not have a reading room, but its digitized content is publicly available.
For presidents since about 2000, “Records have been mostly digital, and so a physical archive is less important,” says H.W. Brands, a historian at the University of Texas, Smithsonian contributor and author of several books on the American presidency. “The Obama center is a logical development in this trend. I expect future presidents will follow his example.”
There is a library onsite at the Obama Presidential Center: the newest branch of the Chicago Public Library, which includes the President’s Reading Room, filled with books—both fiction and nonfiction—selected by the Obamas.
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A few well-known destinations, such as the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry and the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Robie House, are located near the Obama center. Jackson Park itself was built as part of the festival grounds for the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, the fair that gave the world the Ferris Wheel and Cracker Jack. Many of its landmarks survive, including a smaller version of the gilded Statue of the Republic—the original burned after the fair—by Daniel Chester French, who later sculpted Abraham Lincoln for the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
Since then, the area has been largely overlooked in favor of downtown attractions. “This is something the south side of Chicago hasn’t seen, and it’s really creating a place to put on the map,” says Diane Burnham, the executive director of the South East Chicago Commission, a nonprofit economic development organization that covers five South Side neighborhoods.
Rising above the canopy in Jackson Park, the center’s anchor—an eight-story, mostly windowless tower—is clad in highly patterned New Hampshire granite. Its solid shape, slightly tapered at the top, was inspired by four hands coming together.
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To fans, it’s a beacon, especially when seen at night. To critics, it’s an obelisk, or “Obamalisk.” “We felt the responsibility to make the building feel commensurate with what we believed was the power of his presidency,” says Billie Tsien, a principal of Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, designers of the center. “It is obviously a landmark presidency.”
Contemporary architecture isn’t new to presidential libraries—consider the triangular tower of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston by architect I.M. Pei—but it tends to attract criticism for breaking with more subdued styles. The architects of the Obama center explained that its form followed function as they built vertically to minimize its footprint in the park and that museum exhibits don’t need windows.
“We’ve talked about it being a lantern and four hands,” says architect Tod Williams. “It’s all these things, but it’s what happens inside that’s most important.”
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The four floors of museum space at the heart of the center tell the story of Obama’s rise and accomplishments, starting with his largely single-parented boyhood in Hawaii and continuing to his political launch as a community organizer in Chicago and election as president in 2008. But it opens with the history of the United States as told through social movements, from slavery and emancipation to the campaign for women’s suffrage and the civil rights movement.
“Becoming the nation’s first Black president was only made possible because of the people, the social movements and milestones that went before him that really paved the way,” says Louise Bernard, the museum director. “He wanted to ensure that a sense of civics education was embedded throughout, but that it also doesn’t feel like heavy-handed homework.”
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An 88-foot wall of scrolling video and text, a soundtrack of hits from the 1960s and ’70s. and a 1942 Works Progress Administration poster depicting women’s employment in farming, business and manufacturing lighten the load.
The presentation aims to portray “democracy as always a work in progress, and that progress is never linear,” says Bernard. “It zigs and it zags.”
Quick fact: The timeline
- The Obama Presidential Center broke ground in the fall of 2021. Its dedication ceremony will be held on June 18, 2026, and the following day, on Juneteenth, it will open to the public.
Presidential museums “typically make a case for a president’s policies, while acknowledging criticisms of the president,” says Brands. That’s true here with a recounting of the successes of the 44th president, including the 2009 bailout of the auto industry, the 2010 Affordable Care Act, the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan and the adoption of the Paris Agreement on climate in 2015. Smaller plaques accompany many topics detailing “the work that remained,” such as congressional inaction on family leave, state laws restricting health care access, the failure to ban nuclear weapons and the unresolved fate of “Dreamers,” children brought to America by illegal immigrants.
Objects used to relate history in the museum add emotion to history, from the cane used in the 1940s by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to the 1884 medal given to Thomas Mundy Peterson, the first Black man to vote after the passage of the 15th Amendment.
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Bernard says one of her favorite objects, on loan, is the wedding ring of Jim Obergefell, who filed a lawsuit after Ohio refused to recognize his marriage to his dying husband John Arthur, which led to the 2015 Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage nationally. Obama, who initially supported only civil unions, described his shift in support of marriage equality as an evolution based on his relationships with same-sex couples. The ring fuses together both men’s rings with the ashes of Arthur, who died in 2013, and is part of an exhibit entitled “A More Inclusive America.” “Something as seemingly small as that can just tell such a big story,” says Bernard.
Another series showcases what she calls “fun, ephemeral, crowdsourced objects from Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign that capture the energy and spirit of that moment,” including handmade signs and a custom-made red, white and blue swimsuit worn by a college swimmer in 2008 emblazoned with the words “Barack and Roll.”
After traveling through American history, Obama’s election and achievements, the joy and verve of the Obama White House—family dog Bo has his own exhibit, and several of Michelle Obama’s dresses are on display—and taking the opportunity to sit behind the Resolute Desk in a replica of the Oval Office circa 2014, visitors can take an elevator to the Sky Room.
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The eighth-floor observation deck offers views in every direction, including Lake Michigan to the east and the Griffin Museum to the north. In the Sky Room itself, which faces south and west, visitors can survey the surrounding neighborhoods through granite letters on the facade that quote a speech Obama made on the 50th anniversary of 1965’s Selma-to-Montgomery March. Phrases from that speech extend upwards on the ceiling in an installation by British artist Idris Khan.
“I’ve always felt in my head that looking through the words that he wrote is like somehow imagining yourself inside the mind of President Obama,” says Tsien.
The Sky Room provides visitors “a moment to sit and reflect or gather themselves and let their kids run around,” says Bernard. Visitors can access it without paying museum admission, one of several free campus attractions.
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As if mindful of museum fatigue, the 19.3-acre campus leans heavily into recreational balance.
A public plaza that stretches about a block between the museum and the Chicago Public Library will host live music and festivals. The rooftop of the library features a container garden, where vegetables and fruit grow next to a garden classroom and teaching kitchen.
Imaginative climbing features in the form of a dragonfly and a bird’s nest fill the playground, while a wetland walk offers immersion in nature. The Great Lawn was designed to slope, providing the first real sledding hill in the area. “Michelle Obama said as a child, she was never able to go sledding, because Chicago’s pretty flat,” says Jarrett.
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The redesign of Jackson Park restored much of the original plan landscape designers Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux created in 1891. The park originally extended to Lake Michigan but was later bisected by a road. Removing that road added nearly four acres to the park and now visitors can reach the lake from the center unimpeded by traffic.
The center’s landscape architect, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, diversified the neglected park by planting more than 950 trees across 50 varieties. Trees removed during construction were left to compost naturally and “keep the ecological heritage of the site in the new landscape,” says Matt Bird, a principal at the firm.
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Some of the features of the presidential center are designed for community use, including Home Court, the basketball court at the south end of the campus. Others serve public programming, including a media suite designed to teach podcasting and songwriting. Generous lobby spaces filled with monumental art offer free Wi-Fi and encourage visitors and the community to gather to study, hold a book club or take a break from the Chicago weather.
Among contemplative spaces, seating in the center’s atrium frames views of the three-story painting City of the Big Shoulders by Mark Bradford, one of 28 commissioned artworks, most of which are on public view.
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“We want people who come here to look at a piece of art, stand next to a stranger, have a conversation about that piece of art and how it touches them,” says Jarrett.
Dining options will include a coffee shop and a restaurant named in honor of late chef Tafari Campbell, who worked in the White House, which features Obama family favorites such as turkey chili and red rice with shrimp. Shoppers can visit a swag shop where baby onesies read “Presidential.”
The first stop for visitors, though, is often the southwest corner of the museum to read the inscription at the top of the museum tower—the one they’ll later see up close in the Sky Room—from Obama’s 2015 speech in Selma, Alabama.
“It begins with, ‘You are America,’ and it ends with, ‘Nation of ours,’” says architect Tsien. “I think that very much speaks to this idea of going from me to we.”
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