Theaster Gates has spent twenty years quietly reshaping Chicago's South Side—restoring forgotten buildings, opening galleries in neighborhoods where cultural institutions had disappeared, treating art as a tool for self-determination rather than spectacle. Now the Obama Foundation has asked him to do something rare: create a major installation for the Obama Presidential Center, opening in 2026 on the South Side, just blocks from where his Rebuild Foundation has been working.
The commission centers on something Gates has long been drawn to: the visual archives of Ebony and Jet magazines. For decades, these Chicago-based publications documented Black life, culture, and achievement when mainstream media largely ignored them. Their photography became a visual record of a community's own story, told by and for itself.
Gates will install this archive in the Pendleton Atrium at the center, transforming photographs and memories into something that meets visitors as they enter. "I am deeply honored to be commissioned to create a new artwork for the Obama Presidential Center, a beacon of democracy, just a couple of blocks from where my non-profit, Rebuild Foundation has invested in land and cultural assets as tools for creative self-determination for over two decades," Gates said.
We're a new kind of news feed.
Regular news is designed to drain you. We're a non-profit built to restore you. Every story we publish is scored for impact, progress, and hope.
Start Your News DetoxWhat makes this significant isn't just that Gates gets a high-profile platform—it's what it says about how institutions are starting to think about art and history. The Obama Foundation isn't commissioning a single artist to impose a vision. Instead, it's asking someone whose entire practice has been about amplifying existing community narratives, about finding power in what was already there but overlooked.
Rebuild Foundation, which Gates founded in 2009, has become a model for arts-led neighborhood transformation. The Stony Island Arts Bank, housed in a restored bank building, functions simultaneously as Rebuild's headquarters and a public exhibition space. It's not a museum transplanted into a neighborhood—it emerged from the neighborhood itself, rooted in Chicago's actual artistic legacies.
"At a time when artists are increasingly playing a critical role in protecting memory and in contributing to the democratic ideals that continue to shape who we are and what we strive to become, it is deeply meaningful to contribute to this historic space," Gates reflected. Valerie Jarrett, CEO of the Obama Foundation, called him the "ideal artist" for the commission, citing his ability to translate history into the present while genuinely engaging communities in the process.
The Gates installation joins 25 other site-specific commissions across the 19.3-acre campus. Together, they're meant to create what founding director Louise Bernard describes as "a deeply textured cultural landscape that reflects our past, animates the present, and gestures toward the future." That phrasing matters—not a museum that preserves the past in amber, but a living space that lets history breathe and speak to now.
