Few presidents have walked a more improbable path to the American presidency than Barack Obama. So it’s fitting that, much like the president it’s named for, nothing about the Obama Presidential Center is traditional. Not its Juneteenth opening. Not its location on the South Side of Chicago. Not its design, not its sprawling campus that includes a basketball court and outdoor grills, and not the exhibits that not only showcase what the 44th president accomplished but also highlight what he did not get done.
Michelle Obama’s story is also woven throughout the main narrative. There’s a teaching kitchen and a sledding hill. And, in a break with tradition, the $850 million campus does not include the president’s physical archives. The Obamas’ physical papers are in separate facility maintained by the National Archives and Records Administration, and that federal agency is managing his fully digital library.
Watch MS NOW’s exclusive interviews with Barack and Michelle Obama as part of “Hope Comes Home: Inside the Obama Presidential Center,” airing Friday, June 19, from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. ET.
The unconventional approach begins with the name. It’s the Obama Presidential Center. Not a library. That distinction was deliberate and signals an orientation toward everyday people, rather than scholars and history buffs. But the center does include a branch of the Chicago Public Library serving as an invitation to the surrounding community — and especially to the students at the high school directly across the street.
Traditional presidential libraries are usually shrines that zero in on a single man. However, the permanent exhibit in the museum space doesn’t even open with Obama’s childhood in Hawaii, Indonesia or Kansas or his early life in politics. Instead, the museum exhibit begins with the thorny contradictions embedded in America’s founding and its early conflicts. The Declaration of Independence speaks of universal equality in a country that legalized slavery. Barack Obama was elected president of a country that did not allow Black people to vote in many states the year that he was born.
“America is a work in progress” is the first text visitors see when they enter the museum. To underscore that point, visitors see picket signs from labor strikes and suffragist marches. They see farmworkers and civil rights workers and organizers who fought for access and inclusion and opportunity.
I interviewed President Obama about his vision for the 19.3-acre campus, and he said he wanted people to understand that conflict and division are a constant in American democracy but that progress happens when people figure out how to work together toward change.
“You know, maybe a way to think about the presidential center and what at least we tried to create is some touchstones, some markers, some tools for people to just be reminded of ‘Oh, yeah. This is what our democracy is. This is who we are,’” Obama said. “We don’t have to distrust each other. We don’t have to hate each other. We don’t have to scapegoat each other. We could actually try to find common ground and work together to do some good.”
This “Yes We Can” ethos reverberates throughout the campus. At a political moment when cynicism and antagonism and social media warfare can upstage or replace voting or civic participation, that repeated “Yes We Can” and “Yes We Did” message is a rebuke to hopelessness and a reminder that time and time again, ordinary people have showed up to create change, and to help close the gap between what America says it is supposed to be and what it actually is.
“I do think it’s important to ground what happened during my presidency in this broader sweep of American history, this idea that on the right — and you see this in the Trump administration — this idea that any suggestion or criticism that America was anything other than perfect is unpatriotic,” Obama said, referring to exhibits that do not shy away from prickly aspects of American history.
This “Yes We Can” ethos reverberates throughout the campus.
“Now, the flip side among progressives sometimes, there is this sense of ‘Well, the only true narrative of America is this one of oppression and exclusion.’ And I reject both those views. I think it’s complicated. I think it’s possible to celebrate the founders and appreciate what they did, as well as look objectively and critically at how their values strayed very far from what they professed.”
He continued: “I think when you understand the complexities of America and the contradictions of America, I don’t think it makes you love it less. I think it makes you love it more.”
A more conventionally safe version of this center might have focused exclusively on Obama’s accomplishments and legislative victories. To be sure, the exhibits include the high-water marks and the initiatives that left his imprint on our country around healthcare, education, the economy, foreign policy and equal pay.
But there is an exhibit in the museum called “The Unfinished Work” that spells out the ways the Obama administration came up short. This is unusual. Presidential libraries do not normally dwell on disappointments or what did not get done.
The point is that governance is hard and that every effort is not always rewarded with success. The upshot is that the American public is now responsible for the unfinished work — and the museum’s designers are not subtle with that message. There are signs throughout that say “Imagine Your Impact” and even more succinctly: “Do Something.”
That message could have tilted toward a “must do” command that could be intimidating, or even exhausting, but it’s balanced out with big dollops of joy and whimsy. Presidential libraries are not known as repositories for merriment, and this is another example of the Obama Presidential Center charting a different course.
Bright notes include exhibits of the music and the cultural performances from the Obama years at the White House. On more than one visit, I saw custodians dancing with visitors. All that high-stepping is made possible by the playlist. At 7:30 a.m., the overhead speakers on the ground level start to pump out music that reflects the Obamas’ personal tastes, long before the visitors arrive, to get the staff “fired up and ready to go.”
Many of the spaces in the campus don’t require a ticket but are free and open to the public.
The Barack Obama Foundation assembled a storytelling council of historians, scholars, artists, designers, filmmakers and writers that advised the former president about how he might build his “library.” I served on that council, and from the beginning I saw that the goal was to create an inclusive and accessible space that would serve as an incubator for leadership. It would be not only a resource, but also an engine of upward mobility for the surrounding community. That last core value is why so many of the spaces in the campus don’t require a ticket but are free and open to the public. Multiple spaces, inside the building and out, are designed to encourage people to just linger and hang out.
The main structure — which some have dubbed the “Obamalisk” — is bold and modern and, judging by a few of the critiques that have rolled in, it’s not to everyone’s taste. But it is on-message in that it represents what collective action looks like in steel and granite. Architects Billie Tsien and Tod Williams based their design on the image of four cupped hands coming together with fingers pointed to the sky, a symbol that also resembles an expression of “hope” in American Sign Language.
The word “HOPE” greets visitors as they enter the front door of the main building. But timing is as important as location in real estate. The OPC opens at a moment when the idea of a collective American identity or even a common set of facts is under pugilistic negotiation. For many, the arc toward justice feels like it is being bent backward toward tyranny and intolerance.
Like the president himself, the OPC doesn’t ignore the problems of the moment. But it doesn’t give in to despair or disillusionment, either. The Obama Presidential Center insists not only that change is possible, but also that failure and disappointment are guaranteed to come with it.
In the end, the campus is really about the architecture of possibility. Monuments invite admiration. But this place asks for something different. It pleads for participation. The idea is that people from all over the world may find themselves in the same space and ask themselves some version of the same question:
What role can I play?
Michele Norris
Michele Norris is a senior contributing editor for MS NOW.