by Mildred Europa Taylor, Face2FaceAfrica.com
The Obama Foundation has announced that Nigerian-born artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby has been commissioned to create the first official portrait of President and Mrs. Obama for the Obama Presidential Center.
Akunyili Crosby joins the final group of major artist commissions for the Center set to open on June 19, 2026, in Chicago. According to the Obama Foundation, Akunyili Crosby, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Jeffrey Gibson, Rashid Johnson, Hugo McCloud, Martin Puryear, Lorna Simpson, and Norman Teague are creating major site-specific works for the campus, joining a growing roster of artists whose work is central to the Center’s vision of civic engagement.
Designed as a 19.3-acre campus located in Jackson Park on Chicago’s South Side, the Obama Presidential Center will tell the story of the Obamas’ journey from community organizers on Chicago’s South Side to becoming national and global leaders. Beyond the narrative of their legacy, the Center aims to create new opportunities for locals to connect, learn, and engage.
“When the Obama Presidential Center opens next year, it will be a hub for change — a place for our @ObamaFoundation leaders and people from all over the world to come together, get inspired, and take what they learn back to their own communities,” Obama shared in an Instagram post on October 18, 2025.
The campus will feature a museum alongside a branch of the Chicago Public Library, an athletic facility, a fruit and vegetable garden, and various outdoor gathering spaces, including a café and retail shop.
Akunyili Crosby’s work will be exhibited in the Main Lobby of the museum. “The first official portrait of President and Mrs. Obama weaves together archival imagery, family albums, historical ephemera, and cultural touchstones,” the Foundation said of her work in a statement.
“This densely layered work and its precise biographical details simultaneously honor and connect the Obamas’ lasting legacy to the many generations of artists, activists, citizens, and leaders whose collective journeys helped pave their way to the White House and sustained them through two terms.”
The contributions of Akunyili Crosby and the other artists “will anchor the Center in a vibrant artistic legacy that speaks to the values President and Mrs. Obama championed: openness, engagement, and a profound respect for the diverse stories that shape our nation,” said Dr. Louise Bernard, Founding Director of the Obama Presidential Center Museum.
Born and raised in Nigeria before moving to the U.S. at age 16, Akunyili Crosby studied at Swarthmore College, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and Yale University.
The 43-year-old Nigerian-American, who has been residing and working in Los Angeles, has developed a mixed identity that is essential to her body of work as a painter. This is due to how strongly her country of birth defines her cultural identity.
Akunyili Crosby is inspired by political, personal, and artistic references. Her paintings, which are figuratively depicted, evoke the complexity of modern life. Her impressive body of work features a number of key themes that revolve around interiors, daily life, and social gatherings.
She uses a vibrant effect of patterns and photo collages drawn from Nigerian culture, popular culture, or collective memory to help produce her work.
“I’ve always been artistic but I arrived fairly gradually at the decision to become a working artist,” Akunyili Crosby said of how she started painting. “I’ve loved to draw since I was a child; my siblings and I developed our creativity at a young age—Nigerian public television was broadcast at limited hours, toys were too expensive, so we’d make dolls and cars out of matchboxes, ping-pong balls, bottle caps, etc. In that sense, I’ve always been an artist,” she told the National Portrait Gallery.
“During my undergraduate studies at Swarthmore College, I began to appreciate the profoundness of art and think about it as a possible career. For a year after graduating, I returned to a Nigeria in the midst of a significant cultural renaissance and I wished to be a part of that.”
Today, Akunyili Crosby’s work can be found in major museum collections throughout the world. In 2017, her painting, The Beautyful Ones, portraying her older sister as a girl, broke records when it sold at Christie’s for $3.1 million.
That same year, she was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, and in 2019, Akunyili Crosby made the “Time 100 Next” list of rising stars who are shaping the future of the world.
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