Julie Mehretu’s painted glass window Uprising of the Sun cuts through the facade
obama presidential center museum opens in chicago
On Chicago’s South Side, the Obama Presidential Center Museum opens as both a presidential archive and a public call to participation. The museum opened to the public on June 19th, 2026, and occupies four exhibition levels inside the new center, bringing visitors through nearly 35,000 square feet of immersive galleries shaped by Ralph Appelbaum Associates.
Working with the Obama Foundation Museum team, RAA has developed the museum as a layered experience around democracy, public service, and the lives of President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama. The project moves through personal history and national history at once, placing the Obamas’ story within a wider civic landscape of movements, policies, contradictions, and collective action.
The museum sits within the broader Obama Presidential Center campus, designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, but its interior journey has been led by RAA as an experience design project. Here, architecture becomes narrative infrastructure. Visitors move through artifacts and interactive stations that frame democracy as something built through everyday participation rather than held at a distance.
images courtesy The Obama Foundation
ralph appelbaum associates designs a civic sequence
Across the museum, the architects at RAA organize the exhibition journey through four major levels: Toward a More Perfect Union, Working for the Common Good, The People’s House, and We the People. Together, the galleries guide visitors from the country’s founding ideals and unresolved tensions into the specific communities, campaigns, decisions, and public programs that shaped the Obama presidency.
The experience begins with a broad civic frame before narrowing into more personal and political territory. In Toward a More Perfect Union, an illuminated, prismatic opening gallery connects the language of American democracy to the people and movements that have pushed it toward greater inclusion. The space gives the museum its first physical rhythm, using light, scale, and atmosphere to turn abstract ideas into something visitors encounter bodily.
From there, the museum builds toward campaign history and the work of governing. The YES WE CAN Campaign gallery takes shape as a circular space with panoramic media and volunteer voices, surrounding visitors with the energy of the 2008 grassroots movement. Crowd-sourced campaign objects bring the story back down to human scale, showing the election through materials carried, made, and saved by ordinary people.
RAA’s design approach depends on this back-and-forth movement between scale and intimacy. Large media rooms create sweeping historical context, while smaller objects and hands-on moments slow the pace. In Democracy 101, visitors engage with civics through approachable interactive experiences, while Panorama of a Presidency surrounds them with a view into the daily activity of the White House, from meetings and travel to the layered pressures of public office.
RAA designs the museum experience across four exhibition levels
inside the people’s house
One of the museum’s most intimate sections looks at how the Obamas opened the White House as a cultural and public space. Detailed miniature rooms offer a playful view into the People’s House, recreating settings connected to traditions, celebrations, performances, and public programs. Nearby, fashion, state gifts, sports memorabilia, and other artifacts trace how the Obamas brought a more personal and inclusive image of American life into the presidential residence.
Rather than treating these objects as isolated relics, the exhibition places them within a larger story of visibility and belonging. The White House appears as a working home, a stage for diplomacy, and a symbolic space whose meaning shifted through the people invited inside. The design allows visitors to read the presidency through both ceremony and everyday gestures.
The museum’s recurring interactive thread, Imagine Your Impact, carries this idea across the galleries. Visitors are invited to consider how individual actions can join into collective change, with the experience culminating in a shared media moment and large-scale digital artwork. In this way, RAA extends the museum beyond commemoration, asking visitors to locate themselves inside the civic questions the galleries raise.
the museum opens in Jackson Park on Chicago’s South Side
julie mehretu’s painted glass window rises on the museum facade
On the museum building’s north facade, Julie Mehretu’s Uprising of the Sun brings the Center’s public art program into direct conversation with the architecture. The 83-foot-tall by 25-foot-wide painted glass window is composed of 35 abstract panels and was created as a permanent commission for the Obama Presidential Center Museum.
Mehretu’s work draws from President Obama’s remarks at the 50th anniversary of the marches from Selma to Montgomery, translating that historical reference into color, movement, and layered abstraction. From outside, the window climbs the granite surface of the museum tower. From within, it changes as visitors move through the building, turning circulation into a shifting encounter with light and image.
The painted glass gives the museum a public threshold before visitors enter the galleries. It also sets the tone for the project’s wider relationship between art and civic memory. Throughout the Center, commissioned artworks expand the museum’s story beyond official records, bringing in visual languages of identity, hope, struggle, and collective imagination.
Inside the museum, additional works by artists including Jeffrey Gibson, Jules Julien, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons appear within the exhibition spaces. Their commissions are integrated into the visitor experience rather than kept apart as decoration, adding texture to the themes of history, democracy, and change.
an 88-foot media canvas fills the Power of Words gallery
the museum moves visitors through four stacked levels
This Land, Shared Sky by Marie Watt in collaboration with Nick Cave occupies the stairwell
the museum moves through democracy, memory, and collective action
project info:
name: Obama Presidential Center Museum | @obamafoundation
architect: Ralph Appelbaum Associates | @ralph_appelbaum_associates
location: Jackson Park, Chicago, Illinois
opening date: June 19th, 2026
museum experience design: Ralph Appelbaum Associates
campus architecture: Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects
local exhibit design partner: Civic Projects Architecture | @civicprojectsarchitecture
graphic design partner: Normal | @thenormalstudio
artists and design collaborators: Amanda Williams, Andres L. Hernandez, Norman Teague
painted glass commission: Uprising of the Sun, Julie Mehretu | @juliemehretu
area: 35,000 square feet
photography: courtesy the Obama Foundation
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