In the expansive cultural calculus of the soon-to-open Obama Presidential Center on Chicago’s South Side, Theaster Gates has been commissioned to create a work that positions his practice—rooted in archiving, community, and Black visual legacies—at the heart of the institution’s public encounter. The project takes the form of a monumental frieze, stretching more than 175 feet, installed in the Hadiya Pendleton Atrium of the Forum Building. Drawing from photographs in the Johnson Publishing Company archive and the personal collection of photographer Howard Simmons, the work reimagines images long associated with Ebony and Jet, translating moments of everyday Black life into a civic register.
Unlike many presidential libraries and museums that privilege text, documents, and artifacts, this installation foregrounds imagery as a primary vehicle of history. Gates’s approach treats photographs not as illustrations but as witnesses—crowds, families, gestures, and faces that collectively map a social world. Rendered on industrial aluminum, the images gain a material presence that resists sentimentality, situating intimacy within a durable, architectural scale.
The choice of material is characteristic of Gates’s broader practice, which frequently repurposes industrial substances to hold cultural memory. Here, the translation of fragile photographic archives into metal surfaces highlights the tension between permanence and vulnerability, between what is preserved and what is continually at risk of being erased. The work emphasizes that archives are not static storehouses but living systems, continually activated by new contexts and audiences.
Valerie Jarrett, CEO of the Obama Foundation, described the commission as a recognition of Gates’s sustained engagement with public art and Black cultural production, noting his ability to translate history into forms that resonate in the present. Her framing points to the Foundation’s larger ambition: to embed local histories from Chicago’s South Side into an institution with national and international reach.
The location of the installation further intensifies its civic weight. The Hadiya Pendleton Atrium is named after the 15-year-old student who participated in President Obama’s second inauguration and was killed shortly afterward. Within this space, Gates’s images operate not only as celebration but also as remembrance, acknowledging lives shaped—and sometimes cut short—by structural inequities.
Gates has emphasized the personal dimension of the project, noting its proximity to the South Side neighborhoods where his Rebuild Foundation has invested for more than two decades. For him, the commission extends a long-standing commitment to cultural self-determination, linking the labor of preservation to the politics of place.
Scheduled to open in 2026, the Obama Presidential Center has signaled a departure from conventional presidential institutions by placing art and artists at the center of its vision. Gates’s frieze exemplifies this shift. Monumental without being bombastic, it situates Black Chicago not at the margins of American history but squarely within its visual and civic imagination, asking viewers to encounter democracy through the accumulated beauty and complexity of lived experience.