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Met is a tale of two presidents. On June 14 Donald Trump celebrated his 80th birthday by hosting a large crowd of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) on the White House South Lawn. Four days later, on the evening of Juneteeth, Barack Obama he will unveil a monument of his heritage that honors him the courage of Art.
About to Obama Presidential Center on the South Side of Chicago, Barack and Michelle Obama ordered basic services and 30 professionals people of different cultures, bravery has never been done so far at the presidential library. It also creates a silent critique of Obama’s successor, who has filled the Oval Office with stark portraits of the president while planning the demise of such cultural institutions as the Kennedy Center and the Smithsonian Institution.
“He loves art,” he said Valerie Jarrettdirector of the Obama Foundation, reflects on how the Obamas have adopted a more inclusive approach to reducing the White House. “We want people who come here to look at the art, to stand next to a visitor, to talk about the art and how it affects them individually.“
Privately funded $850m presidential centeropening nearly a decade after Obama left office, he is living on a 19-acre campus in Chicago’s Jackson Park, near where he lived as a boy and entered politics. It also includes a new branch of the Chicago Public Library, an NBA-regulation basketball court, a recording studio and a sledding hill built because young Michelle Obama never grew up on the city’s famous South Side.
The new graphics are dotted all over. Jarrett insisted: “There is no art that gives a political voice.” But this depends on what is meant by “politics”. It is related to the beginning of African American history, the struggle for civil rights and the social culture of the people Chicago.
Photo by Martin Puryear The Bend the Arc sculpture was inspired by Martin Luther King’s famous line, “We will prevail because the nature of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” and honors John Lewis for his continued drive. Puryear hand sculpted the upright, 34-ft-tall monument, which was then 3D-processed, digitally enlarged and curved, before it reached its final shape in stainless steel at John Lewis Plaza.
Richard Hunt’s Book Bird, located in the library’s reading garden, depicts a bird bursting from the pages of a book to evoke the power of reading. Hunt was a fixture in the civil rights movement and on Chicago’s South Side. This was his last work before his death in 2023.
The Ann Dunham Water Terrace – named after the president’s mother – has a rock pool Maya Linentitled Seeing Through the Universe, which has a straight tip that produces mist and a flat “stone” that falls with water.
At the top of it all is the museum, a 225-ft granite museum formerly known as the Eye of Sauron, a Klingon prison and “Obamalisk”. Outside, Ethiopian American artist Julie Mehretu has created Uprising of the Sun, an 83-ft-tall stained glass window inspired by Obama’s speech on the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery march.
In the Hope and Change Lobby, a Nigerian-American artist Akunyili Crosby’s grip presents a composite portrait of Barack and Michelle Obama – the first ever created together – that draws on old photos, family albums and historical records. Nick Cave and Marie Watt have teamed up on a multimedia canvas that combines Native American and Black traditions through a web of beads and magical objects.
Biography of Mark Bradford City of Big Shoulders is a 38-ft-tall mural that covers the three-story west wall of the museum’s Our Story atrium, depicting Chicago and Lake Michigan in stunning detail thanks to a riot of colors and artifacts. On the white pyramid-like ceiling of the Nelson Mandela Sky Room, Idris Khan’s Sky of Hope spans thousands of hand-printed quotes taken from Obama’s speeches honoring the extraordinary human rights leaders.
Louise BernardThe founder of the museum, who also worked at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, said that the artists were given freedom. “The artists were really thinking about Obama’s legacy: optimism, connection to place, power of place.” The importance of Chicago is mainly influenced by many jobs.
The art festival differs from star attractions in other presidential libraries: Richard Nixon boasts as White House East roomRonald Reagan is A Boeing 707 that serves as Air Force One and Bush is known to show his your drawings. In another move, the Obama Presidential Center separated itself from the National Archives and Records Administration, leaving millions of federal documents in a warehouse in Maryland and support their digitization instead.
But like its counterparts, the center has a museum that aims to explain good but not false leadership (the Nixon library that used the Watergate scandal against the Democrats. but it was changed in 2011 providing unaltered facts). Obama’s picture is all over the place and his voice is heard loudly saying “Yes, we can!” and other celebratory speeches which they may be from another country to Trump’s “killing of America”.
Indeed, liberals feeling uneasy about the days of Trump – and willing to pay $30 – may find his well-decorated collection both inspiring and depressing, recalling what they saw from Alan Bennett’s play. The History Boys that there is no “distant time like the past”.
Basic history of America’s first black president he is relieved by other painful things: the fence woven by his mother when she was pregnant; Hussein Obama’s grandfather’s colonial-era passport from 1940s Kenya; an essay about William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and King Lear written by an Obama student at Occidental College in Los Angeles (“In both plays, the tragic hero begins his quest for recognition”).
Later, after moving to Chicago, there is a brown bag with the name “Barack” written in gold letters and an invitation to his 1992 wedding to Michelle Robinson. From his 2008 presidential campaign, what was once ephemera is now history: flags, lanyards, signs, posters, 440 campaign buttons, a box of “Obama O’s” cereal and a 7-Eleven coffee cup with Obama’s name on it.
One exhibit, titled The President’s Lucky Charms, reveals small keepsakes, religious items and symbols that supporters have thrust into Obama’s hands on the campaign trail. He made a daily ritual of carrying the selections in his pocket – not because of superstitions, show notes, but as “a constant reminder of the interesting stories of the people he met who read to him so that he would not forget if he became president”.
At the launch of 2009, Marvel published an amazing Spider-Man comic with his cartoon character. The version in which Obama took the oath of office, which was used at Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration, is also on display, along with the Nobel Peace Prize he won shortly after.
But the journey forward is bleak. One quote shows how, in 1968, the Republican Richard Nixon adopted “the opinion of the black people and the controversial culture”. Another said: “The more popular Barack Obama was in office, the more hate there was for racists and xenophobes.” was born in Kenya and studied at an Islamic religious school in Indonesia … The election caused many people to speak insulting words.”
At times like this the museum serves as an ominous reflection of Trump’s rise – yet it does not mention him by name and, contrary to tradition, he was not invited to Thursday’s inauguration. (Ironically, Obama’s vice president of eight years, Joe Bidenit is also given a shorter font in the display.)
Mr. Trump is also focusing on the third part, Working for the Common Good, which describes the eight years of Obama. One section is called Restoring American Leadership and mentions the Paris climate agreement (broken by Trump), Iran nuclear deal (broken by Trump), restoring relations with Cuba (broken by Trump) and taking action against Ebola in West Africa (impossible to repeat now that USAid has been broken by Trump).
There are also successes, such as saving the economy from collapse after the reckless lending of Wall Street and overcoming Republican opposition to increase health care for millions, although the museum admits, surprisingly, that the Affordable Care Act did not benefit anyone. The assassination of 9/11 mastermind Osama Bin Laden is here, of course, but in a more subdued and colorful display featuring a flag taken in a commando raid. The group called “Improving the immigration system” is now not well understood.
The fourth section, The People’s House, is a delight with detailed dioramas of the various rooms of the White House, many of Michelle Obama’s clothes and a view of the Oval Office (sans Trump Gold) where visitors can sit at the Resolute’s desk – and open its drawer to see a letter George W Bush wrote to his successor.
The end of the body and mind is on the eighth level. Free and open to the public without a museum ticket, the observatory offers views of the South Side, the Chicago skyline and Lake Michigan. The windows are covered with large, 5-ft concrete letters from the text of the Obama’s 2015 speech in Selma: “You are America. Unbound by convention and convention. Unfazed by what is, ready to seize what should be.”
It’s a good idea that aims to rise above the current Washington culture. When, at last week’s meeting, the reporter raised the unpleasant topic of Trump’s attack on Obama’s legacy, and democracy itself, Jarrett said that he now runs a charity: “I’m not talking about politics anymore. What will remain constant is what drove President Obama to run for office and serve for years and the work we are doing now is preparing for the next generation..”
One item missing from the collection: the tan suit Obama wore to a press conference in 2014, which is considered controversial. his Wikipedia article in those simple times. “The reason we don’t have a tan suit is because President Obama gave it away when he was cleaning his closet,” Jarrett said wryly. “We thought the same thing but it couldn’t be true.”
