Presidential portrait commissions rarely feel like art events. They tend to arrive as institutional gestures, decorous and expected. The unveiling of "The Obamas: Springing Forth" (2026) is a different kind of occasion entirely.
On June 14, the Obama Presidential Center unveiled the first official portrait of Barack and Michelle Obama together, painted by Njideka Akunyili Crosby. The work will be permanently installed in the museum's Hope and Change Lobby, a public space that does not require a ticket. The center opens its doors on June 19, 2026, coinciding with Juneteenth.
The painting is executed in acrylic, colored pencils, charcoal, and transfers on paper, measuring 108 by 120 inches unframed. Scale alone signals ambition. But the more striking quality is its density. Known for her layered compositions, Akunyili Crosby incorporated images of places and symbols that encapsulate the Obamas' public and personal histories, among them Michelle Obama's Chicago childhood home and the Charles Alston Martin Luther King Jr. bust that sat in the Oval Office during the former president's terms. Additional references include the carved relief of the Resolute Desk and the cover of Stevie Wonder's album "Talking Book," the first album Michelle Obama received.
In the final work, Michelle is portrayed seated cross-legged just in front of Barack, who sits on a desk, subtly angled toward her. The positioning is intentional. Akunyili Crosby said she was "thinking of a composition that would not preference one [Obama] over the other but to treat them equally," adding, "They are like equal."
Akunyili Crosby is best known for her richly layered paintings that weave together personal memory, photography, and history, and she approached the Obama portrait as a visual archive. Born in Nigeria in 1983, she earned her MFA from Yale University in 2011. A MacArthur Foundation Fellow, she appeared on Time magazine's "100 Next" list of rising stars in 2019. Her photo-transfer technique, in which imagery is applied directly to the picture surface and overworked with paint and drawing, produces compositions that feel simultaneously documentary and invented. Memory made physical.
Standing before the finished work for the first time, Michelle Obama said: "It's us and all of the stories within the story." Barack Obama's reaction was lighter. He asked, "How come you didn't dye my hair in the photo?" as the crowd laughed, before adding, "Don't they usually touch that up a little bit?"
The new portrait joins a major art program at the Obama Presidential Center, which features commissions by more than 30 artists, including Julie Mehretu, Rashid Johnson, Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, Jeffrey Gibson, Maya Lin, Martin Puryear, and Theaster Gates. The Hope and Change Lobby itself honors the foundational ideas of Barack Obama's 2008 campaign. Valerie Jarrett, CEO of the Obama Foundation, said: "When visitors enter the Hope and Change Lobby, we hope they will feel what we did during President Obama's historic 2008 campaign — that change is not only possible but achievable."
The 19.3-acre campus, designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects in collaboration with Interactive Design Architects, sits within Jackson Park on Chicago's South Side. It took nearly five years to construct. That history gives the portrait's arrival added weight. A work this loaded with personal and civic detail is not just a lobby painting. It is an argument for how public institutions might use art to do serious cultural work.
For Akunyili Crosby, the commission marks a notable expansion of her reach into permanent civic space. Her canvases have long occupied gallery walls and museum collections. Anchoring the entry to one of America's newest presidential institutions places her practice in a different register. What visitors encounter before they see a single artifact or document is this: a dense, layered account of two lives, painted by a Nigerian-born artist working in Los Angeles, for a center built on Chicago's South Side. The geography of that sentence matters.
Follow topics and authors from this story to see more stories like this in your personalized feed and receive updates when new work is published.