Obama presidential center opens in Chicago
On Chicago‘s South Side, the Obama Presidential Center Museum it opens as both a presidential record and a public invitation to participate. THE museum opened to the public on June 19, 2026 and occupies four exhibition levels within the new center, bringing visitors through nearly 35,000 square feet of immersive galleries designed by Ralph Appelbaum Associates.
Working with the Obama Foundation Museum team, the RAA developed the museum as a multi-layered experience around democracy, public service and the lives of President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama. The work moves through personal history and national history simultaneously, situating the Obamas’ story in a larger urban landscape of movements, politics, contradictions, and collective action.
The museum is located within the wider campus of the Obama Presidential Center, designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, but its internal journey was guided by the RAA as an experience design project. Here, architecture becomes narrative infrastructure. Visitors move through objects and interactive stations that frame democracy as something that is built through everyday participation rather than distance.
Images courtesy of the Obama Foundation
ralph appelbaum associates designs an urban sequence
Throughout her museumthe architects at the RAA organize the exhibition’s journey into four main levels: Towards a More Perfect Union, Working for the Common Good, The People’s House, and We the People. Together, the galleries lead visitors from the country’s founding ideals and unresolved tensions to the specific communities, campaigns, decisions and public programs that shaped the Obama presidency.
The experience begins with a broad political context before narrowing down to more personal and political terrain. In Toward a More Perfect Union, an illuminated, prismatic opening gallery connects the language of American democracy with the people and movements that have pushed it toward greater integration. The space gives the museum its first physical rhythm, using light, scale and atmosphere to transform abstract ideas into something visitors physically encounter.
From there, the museum builds on the history of the campaign and the work of governance. The YES WE CAN Campaign gallery takes the form of a circular space with panoramic media and volunteer voices, surrounding visitors with the energy of the grassroots movement of 2008. Crowd-sourced campaign objects bring history back to a human scale, showing the election through materials carried, made and saved by ordinary people.
RAA’s design approach hinges on this movement between scale and intimacy. Large media rooms create sweeping historical context, while smaller objects and practical moments slow the pace. At Democracy 101, visitors engage with citizens through accessible interactive experiences, while Panorama of a Presidency surrounds them with a view of the day-to-day activity of the White House, from meetings and travel to the multi-layered pressures of public office.
The RAA designs the museum experience across four exhibition levels
inside the people’s house
One of the museum’s most intimate sections examines how the Obamas opened the White House as a cultural and public space. Detailed miniature rooms offer a playful view of the People’s House, recreating scenes associated with 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 picture of American life to the presidential residence.
Rather than treating these objects as individual relics, the exhibition situates them within a larger story of visibility and belonging. The White House appears as a workhouse, a stage for diplomacy, and a symbolic space whose meaning shifted through the people invited inside. The design allows visitors to read the presidency in both ceremonial 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 be part of collective change, with the experience culminating in a shared moment of media and large-scale digital artwork. In this way, the RAA extends the museum beyond memory, asking visitors to find themselves within the urban questions posed by the galleries.
the museum opens in Jackson Park on Chicago’s South Side
Julie Mehretu’s stained glass window towers over the museum’s facade
On the north facade of the museum building, Uprising of the Sun by Julie Mehretu brings the Center’s public art program into direct conversation with architecture. The 83-foot-tall, 25-foot-wide stained glass window consists of 35 abstract panels and was created as a permanent commission for the Obama Presidential Center Museum.
Mehretu’s work is based on President Obama’s remarks on the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches, translating this historical reference into color, movement and layered abstraction. From the outside, the window climbs the granite surface of the museum tower. From the inside, it changes as visitors move through the building, turning traffic into a changing 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 broader relationship between art and civic memory. Throughout the Center, commissioned artworks extend the museum’s history beyond official records, bringing visual languages of identity, hope, struggle, and collective imagination.
Inside the museum, additional works by artists such as Jeffrey Gibson, Jules Julien and María Magdalena Campos-Pons are displayed in the exhibition spaces. Their commissions are integrated into the visitor experience rather than kept separate as decoration, adding texture to the themes of history, democracy and change.
an 88-foot multimedia canvas fills the Power of Words gallery
the museum moves visitors through four stacked levels
