Barack Obama Presidential Center
The Barack Obama Presidential Center is a museum, library, and education project in Chicago to commemorate the presidency of Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States. The center will also include community and conference facilities and will house the nonprofit Obama Foundation. Construction on the campus began in 2021, the tower topped out in mid-2024, and the center is expected to open in June 2026.
The center's work includes digitizing the Barack Obama Presidential Library with the National Archives and Records Administration, to create the first fully digitized presidential library. The Library is administered by NARA, which will preserve hardcopies of documents at a separate NARA facility; however, many will be loaned to the Presidential Center for display.
The center is located in Jackson Park on the South Side of Chicago, adjacent to the University of Chicago campus. The university provides planning, support, engagement and programming. Included within the center's plans is a new branch for the Chicago Public Library.
Originally slated to open in 2021, it is now projected to open in 2026. Federal review ended in December 2020; groundbreaking was in August 2021. Delays have been due to lawsuits and budget overruns. The center, on 19.3 acres, includes several buildings for the museum, library, foundation, community, and athletic facilities. Most of the land is being constructed as landscaped urban park with playgrounds and gardens, and includes reclaiming a previous roadway for parkland. The buildings and land are owned by the City of Chicago, with the foundation given a 99-year use, construction, and maintenance agreement.
Board and staff
The Obama Foundation board includes Chairman Marty Nesbitt, a close friend from Chicago; J. Kevin Poorman, president and CEO of PSP Capital Partners; David Plouffe; Obama's half-sister Maya Soetoro-Ng; venture capital financier John Doerr; Studio Museum in Harlem Director and Chief Curator Thelma Golden; fundraiser and former White House Social Secretary Julianna Smoot; investment managers John Rogers and Michael Sacks; and former Governor of Massachusetts Deval Patrick. Barack Obama has a home in Hyde Park. The foundation was formally established in January 2014.Louise Bernard, outgoing Director of Exhibitions at the New York Public Library, was named director of the Museum of the Obama Presidential Center in May 2017. Michael Strautmanis became the vice-president of civic engagement for the foundation in 2016.
Kenvi Phillips was appointed as the inaugural director of the Barack Obama Presidential Library for a term beginning June 16, 2024.
Site selection
In 2014, the Obama Foundation released details for institutions interested in being the location of the center.The foundation ultimately received bids from four institutions:
- Columbia University
- University of Chicago
- University of Illinois at Chicago
- University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
After the foundation's board had selected to build the center in partnership with the University of Chicago they began deciding between two possible locations, Washington Park and Jackson Park. They ultimately selected Jackson Park.
In 2018, the Obama Foundation released the proposed bid by the University of Chicago, and the three other universities. The 2014 bid revealed that the University of Chicago included various plans, such as combining the golf courses at South Shore and Jackson Park into a single "world class facility", and the closing of Cornell Drive and other streets in the vicinity of Jackson Park in order to improve the connecting green space for museums located in a nearby area known as "Museum Campus South".
Planning and design
The University of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Hawaii, and Columbia University submitted proposals to host the institution. In May 2015, the Barack Obama Foundation and Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel announced that the foundation and the Barack Obama Presidential Center would be located in Chicago's South Side, and would be built in partnership with the University of Chicago. Both the former president and his wife Michelle Obama stressed the importance of Chicago's South Side as an influence in their own lives. She said, "One of my greatest honors is being a proud Chicagoan, a daughter of the South Side. I still lead with that descriptor. I wear it boldly and proudly like a crown."A design advisory committee assisted in the selection of the architects. Members of the committee included sculptor Don Gummer ; Ed Schlossberg of ESI Design ; Fred Eychaner, a Chicago radio station owner and Democratic financier; and Architectural Digest magazine editor Margaret Russell. Seven architectural firms were announced as finalists in December 2015 from an initial list of 140 applicants: John Ronan Architects, Adjaye Associates, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Renzo Piano Building Workshop, SHoP Architects, Snøhetta, and Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects.
In June 2016, the foundation chose New York-based Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects and Chicago-based Interactive Design Architects to jointly lead the design and engineering of the center. For the exhibition design, Ralph Appelbaum Associates, which worked on the National Museum of African American History, will lead a team including Civic Projects, Normal, and several local artists. The landscape architect is Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, with Site Design Group, and Living Habitats. Lakeside Alliance, which includes Turner Construction and a consortium of local African-American owned firms: Powers & Sons Construction, UJAMAA Construction, Brown & Momen, Safeway Construction, and Kates Security Services will build the center.
Two parks near the University of Chicago's campus, Jackson Park and Washington Park, were considered. On July 29, 2016, the foundation announced the selection of portion of Jackson Park in the Woodlawn neighborhood. Jackson Park, designed by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, already houses the Museum of Science and Industry and a golf course.
Preliminary plans were unveiled in May 2017, involving three buildings in geometric shapes covered in light-colored stone, roughly. The museum building will be the tallest at. The other buildings, a library building and a forum building, will be a single story. The latter building will feature an auditorium, a restaurant, and a public garden. In 2018, the center announced an agreement to place a Chicago Public Library branch within the complex.
The unveiled plan incorporates the Jackson Park end of Midway Plaisance from the north, and the entirety of the park's hockey field and adjoining parkland to the south, where the main buildings and new park landscaping are to be sited. As part of a wider plan to reclaim parkland and improve park safety, the project also necessitates the closure, between 60th and 67th streets, of South Cornell Drive, a 6-lane thoroughfare that runs along the western park lagoon and the park's golf course from Midway Plaisance to South Shore. Without improvements to other roadways that will accommodate local traffic, these closures will result in nine intersections in the area to operate over capacity causing substantial traffic delays. These infrastructure changes would not be paid for by the Obama Foundation, and would require government funding, expected to cost the city $175 million.
In 2024, a fourth building designed by Moody Nolan Chicago and Renauld Deandre Mitchell designated The Programs and Athletics Center broke ground on the campus. To be called Home Court, the building is designed to include a regulation size basketball court and other athletic facilities and community meeting rooms. That building is sometimes locally referred to as the "Obamalisk".
On September 10, 2025, the Obama Foundation announced that it had commissioned ten artists to create 9 site-specific works for the Center. The artists are Nick Cave, Nekisha Durrett, Jenny Holzer, Jules Julien, Idris Khan, Aliza Nisenbaum, Jack Pierson, Alison Saar, Kiki Smith, and Marie Watt. They join Lindsay Adams, Spencer Finch, Richard Hunt, Maya Lin and Julie Mehretu who had previously been commissioned to create works.
Local reaction and controversies
The site of the Center, Jackson Park, lies at the intersection of three neighborhoods: the historically affluent, racially integrated Hyde Park and the more economically depressed, majority-African-American Woodlawn and South Shore. Thus, despite Obama's longtime residence in and association with Hyde Park, the Center's construction in Jackson Park has elicited widespread concerns about gentrification and the displacement of longtime South Side residents, especially African-American residents. A separate series of controversies have revolved around the Center's appropriation of public parkland.Community benefits agreement
The Obama Library South Side Community Benefits Agreement Coalition, a coalition of 19 community and activist groups, is seeking a community benefits agreement to require that the Obama Foundation, in partnership with the City of Chicago, set aside jobs for residents in the local communities, protect low-income housing and home owners, support and create Black businesses, and strengthen neighborhood schools. Some residents have concerns about rising property taxes and rents that could displace many of the low-income Black residents. Recent rent increases for residents living directly across from the site escalated concerns of displacement of residents, particularly those who have fixed incomes, and has drawn protests against local Aldermen who are in opposition of a community benefits agreement. As of 2018, the Obama Foundation has so far refused to consider a community benefits agreement.The foundation has announced plans for community hiring. An economic impact assessment estimates that about 28% of the 4,945 short-term construction jobs would go to South Side residents, with the remainder to the rest of Cook County. About 2,175 of the 2,536 long-term jobs would to go South Side residents, with the remainder to residents in rest of Cook County. It is estimated that the long-term jobs will bring in about $104 million in annual income to Cook County residents, or about $41,000 per job.
In July 2019, local aldermen Jeanette Taylor and Leslie Hairston introduced an ordinance aimed at protecting affordable housing near the development. The ordinance would require 30% of new units built in a 2-mile radius of the development to be affordable and offer right of first refusal for nearby tenants, among other benefits. The ordinance earned support from nearly 30 aldermen in Chicago City Council. In January 2020, Mayor Lori Lightfoot's administration announced that it would support a scaled-back version of a Community Benefits Agreement ordinance, but Taylor re-iterated support for the original ordinance.
In July 2020, the Lightfoot administration and aldermen Taylor agreed on a compromise ordinance that went further than the administration's earlier proposal. The compromise ordinance would require that 30% of units on 52 city-owned lots in Woodlawn be reserved for residents making between 30% and 50% of the Area Median Income, that any building refinanced through the Preservation of Existing Affordable Rentals program must reserve 10% of units for those making less than 30% of the AMI and 10% for those making less than 50% of the AMI, that the city's Housing Department request $675,000 in federal funds to support a local program to promote homeownership among current residents, and that eligibility restrictions be loosened for Woodlawn's Home Improvement Grant Program. The compromise was reached after negotiations between the administration, aldermen Taylor and Hairston, the CBA Coalition, and other community groups. Taylor called the compromise ordinance a "step in the right direction" and, along with members of the CBA coalition, called for further action.