The Obama Foundation has tapped a local talent with its latest commission for its highly anticipated Obama Presidential Center (OPC), set to open on Chicago’s South Side in 2026. Artist Theaster Gates will create an expansive frieze drawing drawing from the Johnson Publishing Company image archive and the Howard Simmon and photographic collections. 

The new installation will occupy the Pendleton Atrium at the forthcoming OPC and celebrate the visual archives of the Chicago legacy magazines Ebony and Jet, both longtime sources of inspiration in Gates’s artistic practice. 

“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 in a statement, referring to the organization he founded on Chicago’s South Side in 2009.

Rebuild Foundation has led a broader cultural revitalization of the city’s predominantly Black neighborhoods, restoring historic buildings and establishing institutions such as the Stony Island Arts Bank, which functions as both the foundation’...