Spencer Finch and Lindsay Adams to create large-scale commissions for Obama Presidential Center – The Art Newspaper

22 April 2025

The Obama Presidential Center has commissioned new site-specific works by the artists Spencer Finch and Lindsay Adams for buildings on its 19-acre campus, located in the Woodlawn neighbourhood on Chicago’s South Side. Scheduled to open in the first half of 2026, the centre will include more than 20 commissioned artworks, most of which will be in spaces that are free and open to the public.

Finch, known for his immersive installations that explore colour and memory, will create an installation of wall tiles that invokes the palettes of four cities—Honolulu, Nairobi, Jakarta and Chicago itself—that were formative to former US president Barack Obama’s development. The commission from the Chicago-based painter Adams, an installation reimagining one of her gestural, gem-coloured abstract paintings, is titled Weary Blues after the Langston Hughes poem of the same name.

Previously announced commissions for the centre include a garden with a Maya Lin-designed fountain, a monumental sculpture by the Chicago artist Richard Hunt and an 83ft-tall stained glass window in the museum building’s façade by Julie Mehretu, which stretches vertically along much of the granite-clad tower.

The centre “will be an arts destination in its own right”, says Louise Bernard, the director of the Obama Presidential Center Museum. “I think that may be unexpected for many people when they think about presidential libraries and museums, that art would be such a central focus.”

Read the full announcement in The Art Newspaper here.

Image: Photo by Matthew Herrmann, Courtesy Hill Art Foundation, New York