The ART of POSSIBILITY

Filled with original commissioned artwork, the new OBAMA PRESIDENTIAL CENTER in CHICAGO is much more than a monument to PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA'S eight years in office. It's a reminder of what FREEDOM really looks like—and what AMERICA, at its best, can still be.

- Story by LAUREN MICHELE JACKSON

Tradition is not untouchable,” Njideka Akunyili Crosby tells me.

“We can own it, we can shape it, we can move it the way we need.” Akunyili Crosby is talking about the matter of art—literally, the stuff of which her collaged, culturally scenic paintings are made. The 43-year-old Nigerian-born, Los Angeles-based artist's practice is built on a discipline of old, with “very strong rules,” down to the way a canvas is pinned. Thus, each choice she makes in terms of materials—paper instead of the customary linen, acrylic paints and colored pencils alongside oils—poses a new question about what is substantive about art.

There is also a metaphorical dimension here, particularly given the occasion of Akunyili Crosby's latest work: the first official portrait of former president Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama together, one of 28 original artworks commissioned for the new Obama Presidential Center on the South Side of Chicago, which opens to the public on Juneteenth.

Akunyili Crosby's works are technically complex and resemble conventional figurative paintings at a distance. But they are composed of dense layers of embedded images, in something like a visual archive. They incorporate photo transfers that lend objects a special gravity, the sense of “a physical thing that exists,” she says. It is one way her work brings the institutional practice of portraiture into dialogue with contemporary ideas about identity, history, and memory—motifs she has brought to bear in rendering the Obamas.

When Akunyili Crosby and I speak in late April, she is still in the thick of working on the portrait in her L.A. studio. The labor that has gone into it, shared with her small team, has been immense. It began with innumerable hours of research—of poring over books and transcripts, of watching and listening to speeches and podcasts, and of sifting through thousands upon thousands of images—before she committed her first brushstroke.