At the Obama Presidential Center on Chicago’s South Side, opening June 2026, Carrie Mae Weems will present The Cool Blue Wind, a major public art commission developed for the Obama Foundation’s expanded cultural programme. The work extends the Center’s commitment to civic memory through a layered reflection on history, sound, and shared experience.
‘The Cool Blue Wind’: jazz, memory, and collective identity
Weems’s commission takes shape as a photographic collage printed on metallic surfaces with blue tonal shifts, paired with an original soundtrack. It revisits the resonance of Barack Obama’s 2008 election while drawing on jazz as a structural reference point—its improvisation, its openness, its insistence on collective listening.
Across the installation, the photographic fragments operate like rhythmic sequences: discontinuous yet interlinked, building a field of shared recollection. Sound threads through the images, extending the work into a spatial composition where memory, dialogue, and civic imagination sit in constant exchange.
A campus shaped by public art and collective voices
Weems joins a wide constellation of artists commissioned for the 19.3-acre Obama Presidential Center, which will include museum spaces, a library, gardens, athletic facilities, and public programmes.
Alongside her contribution, the campus will feature works by Mark Bradford, Tyanna J. Buie, Jay Heikes, and a collaborative mural by Sam Kirk and Dorian Sylvain, alongside commissions by Theaster Gates, Julie Mehretu, Maya Lin, and Jenny Holzer.
Within this broader constellation, Weems’s work emerges as a layered reflection on history in motion, where image and sound intersect to chart how collective identity is continually shaped, recalled, and reconfigured through cultural experience.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA tours the OBAMA PRESIDENTIAL CENTER in Chicago, IL on Thursday April 30, 2026
Courtesy of THE OBAMA FOUNDATION
