The forthcoming Obama Presidential Center, a museum and library celebrating the 44th US president, has announced a new artist commission in advance of its opening in 2026. The latest work to be revealed is an installation by Theaster Gates, the renowned Chicago-based artist and community luminary.
Gates’s piece centres on the image archives of the Johnson Publishing Company—the publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines—and the photographer Howard Simmons, once the company’s staff photographer. Gates will create a large frieze made of photo-printed aluminium that will honour the day-to-day dignity of Black life as depicted in the pages of Ebony and Jet and commemorate the vibrancy of Black culture throughout the 20th century.
The frieze will also be visible to passersby on Stony Island Avenue, where the artist’s gallery and archival space (Stony Island Arts Bank) is located—an offshoot of his broader Rebuild Foundation project.
20,000 photographs
Gates has been working with and archiving 20,000 photographs from Johnson Publishing’s archives since 2016. John H. Johnson, who founded the company, established Ebony and Jet in Chicago after moving from Arkansas during the Great Migration. In the process, he redefined a generation of Black aesthetics and business at the height of the civil rights movement. Johnson received a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996.
Theaster Gates sifts through some of the images in the archives Photo: Akilah Townsend, courtesy the Obama Foundation
Gates’s commission enshrines the archive as a testament to Black cultural heritage on Chicago’s South Side.
High-profile art
News of Gates’s frieze comes in the wake of several other recent announcements of high-profile displays at the Obama Center. They include works by Lindsay Adams, Nick Cave, Aliza Nisenbaum, Jenny Holzer and Idris Khan. In autumn 2024, an 83ft-high painted glass window by Julie Mehretu was installed in the Obama Center. In 2022, Maya Lin was chosen to design a sculptural water feature for the terrace dedicated to Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham.
In a statement, Gates said he was “deeply honoured” by the commission, calling the Obama Center a “beacon of democracy”.
“I've known Theaster since his days as the first transit arts planner for the Chicago Transit Authority 25 years ago, and he is the ideal artist for this marquee space,” Valerie Jarrett, the Obama Foundation chief executive, said in a statement, “People from around the world will be awestruck by his work—but just as importantly, those of us from the South Side will see our community continue to be elevated to the world-class status it has always deserved.”