On a recent morning at Chicago’s new Obama Presidential Center, the institution’s leadership discussed presidential papers the way a decluttering convert might talk about some old sweaters they tossed because they did not spark joy.
The campus contains many features sure to delight the misty-eyed visitors who will flock here once it opens, on June 19: a museum that can come across like a pep talk from a more hopeful time; a light-filled basketball court; a whimsical playground; a public library. It even has a new sledding hill because Michelle Obama, who grew up nearby, recalled having to forgo the winter activity because the area was so flat.
What this $850 million Obamaplex does not have, however, are the archives of the 44th president. Those that aren’t are already digitized are in the process of being converted and can be found in physical form more than 600 miles away, in Maryland. “The advantages of having everything in one location might be fun for people who like to sift through the papers,” Obama Foundation CEO Valerie Jarrett told reporters. “We would much rather have a Chicago Public Library on our site than filling it up with a bunch of papers.”
After standing in the glow of this new South Side landmark, I admittedly feel like a buzzkill focusing on documents, kind of like visiting the Sistine Chapel and contemplating the plumbing. Did you see that exuberant Mark Bradford work? And what about the jaw-dropping view of Lake Michigan from the tower?
But the papers, or lack thereof, are symptomatic of a more crucial shift with the Obama Center. Though many will dub it a “presidential library,” the complex, in a break with tradition, is not technically a part of the federal presidential-library system and instead is entirely controlled by the Obama Foundation. Early on in planning, the organization split with the National Archives and Records Administration, meaning that although it partners with NARA, which is digitizing Barack Obama’s documents, and borrows from their collections, there is no federal financial support and no NARA staff on-site. The center does have a storytelling council composed of historians and scholars to help advise on the narrative, but the pen writing Obama’s history is held, in essence, by Obama’s foundation, and thus, by Obama himself. (Separate from the center, NARA set up a Barack Obama Presidential Library website and describes his as the “first fully digital” presidential library.)
Asked about concerns of potential bias, Jarrett pointed to displays at the museum about the botched Affordable Care Act website and the administration’s failure to get gun reform through Congress. “President Obama is really good at self-reflection,” she told me. “He is the first to say We didn’t get this right. We should have done this a little differently.”
Still, it’s a situation that makes some historians queasy. Anyone’s capacity for personal reflection is limited, and even if the former president were capable of astral-projection levels of self-study, should similar trust really extend to every former colleague and family member tasked with stewarding his legacy?
The privatization of the Obama Center and the potential siloing of future libraries from the wider system marks a change in how the collective memory of the most important figures in the nation’s history will be shaped. As presidential libraries swell into costly complexes—even, possibly, a hotel in Donald Trump’s case—institutions originally intended for the work of scholarship and history-making risk trafficking instead in a kind of legacy upkeep that deprives us all of deeper understanding.
The presidential-library system dates back to the 1930s, when Franklin D. Roosevelt, overwhelmed by documents, sought the help of historians and others to sort his materials, eventually leading to the establishment of a place—the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York—to house them.
Some libraries’ relationships with the National Archives have changed over time. The George W. Bush Museum at his library divorced from NARA in 2022, a move that sparked a petition and concern from Democrats on the House Oversight Committee. NARA and the George W. Bush Foundation ultimately agreed to signage distinguishing between the two entities’ spaces and that the foundation would seek input from NARA for major exhibit changes.
The Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, facing financial difficulties, requested to come under the agency’s umbrella in the 2000s after operating independently for years. As its first federal director, Tim Naftali, now a senior research scholar at Columbia University, was responsible for transforming the museum, including its Watergate exhibit, which contained false claims and had been put together by Nixon allies, into a place that told a more truthful story. “We had to create a different culture, a nonpartisan culture,” he told me. He faced intense pressure from the Richard Nixon Foundation, which saw the place more like a shrine, he said. “The beauty of having the National Archives involved was that you always had people pushing—sometimes gently, sometimes not so gently—to remind the foundation that the American people have the right to all the facts.”
Obama was a very different president, but Naftali was disappointed his center wouldn’t join the network. He worries that the distance between the center and the president’s archives could complicate public access to records; his hope was “the nonpartisan Obama Museum could be a model of how to present a factually complete view of a presidency, because the president had been so careful to avoid real scandals.”
Over the years, though, presidential-library projects have become more costly, and NARA now requires foundations to set aside a larger percentage of the build cost up front for maintenance. An Obama presidential library would have been the first to face a new requirement to raise 60 percent extra. By skipping the NARA affiliation, the Obama Center avoided the extra costs.
Trump’s coming presidential center—a skyscraper in Miami that looks more like a business venture—is also privately supported and is already facing scrutiny from Democrats after some funds appear to have gone missing. His records are, similarly, supposed to be administered separately through the National Archives, though the president and the Justice Department have claimed that he, rather than the public, owns the documents.
[Read: The Trump library symbolizes his presidency perfectly]
The Obama Foundation has framed its own independence as a point of pride, a sign of how well endowed they are, and a source of freedom from government bureaucracy. Jarrett emphasized that the center would not have to close during a federal-government shutdown.
These days, with Trump’s overhaul of the Kennedy Center, threats against the Smithsonian, and rampant firings across the federal government—some of which resulted in a brief closure of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum last year—history, in any federally affiliated space, can seem like it’s built on quicksand. And given that the current president has put falsehoods about his predecessor on the White House’s walls, a former first family wanting to hold their own story close is understandable. The loss, then, might not be only in what comes from privatization, but what happens when history’s safety nets are dismantled.
Paul M. Sparrow, a former director of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, told me that typically, NARA curators and archivists at the library seek input from outside historians to guide exhibitions, leading to a “warts and all” version of history. He pointed, as an example, to a show at the FDR Library about civil rights that touched on FDR’s refusal to endorse a federal anti-lynching law and controversy over the limitations on who was eligible for Social Security.
Sparrow was part of a National Archives team involved in the early planning stages of the Obama Center before it went independent and said he’s especially worried about its financial strategy. “Leaving office, your fundraising abilities are quite extraordinary,” he told me, but 75 years later, the landscape looks a lot different. You can see this change reflected in attendance, too: The JFK Library received more than half a million visitors in its first year and now averages about 175,000.
Looking at the Obama Center plans, Sparrow said, “My initial reaction was, Wow, this is incredibly ambitious and will be very difficult for a private foundation to maintain on the long-term time frames that the National Archives thinks at.” There was a culture clash, he said, between “people who are used to political campaigns and people who are used to trying to preserve things for future generations.”
If the Obama Center is campaigning, it’s doing a pretty good job. Like a skilled political leader, the place, with its geometric angles soaring above the landscape, manages to be both impressive and approachable. Inspired in part by Obama’s love of the modernist Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși—who is known for his simplified, totemlike forms—it aspires to an “irreducible” feeling, Tod Williams, one of the architects (along with Billie Tsien), told reporters.
As you enter the campus from the southwest, the tower is framed by an arch sculpture by Martin Puryear, which references the famous line about the moral arc of the universe bending toward justice. But the organically shaped work looks tenuous, suggesting just how fragile that oft-cited arc truly is. Letters at the top of the tower anchoring the campus spell out lines from Obama’s 2015 speech at Selma, Alabama, forming a puzzle for the eyes. They’ve been derided by architecture critics and online commenters for their inscrutability, but one line of the text rings out: You are America. The lower levels of the museum, meanwhile, are a veritable party of art. Marie Watt and Nick Cave’s scintillating bead-and-tin-jingle tapestry seems to dance along a lobby wall; Lava Thomas’s hot-pink tambourines dangle from the ceiling. Between floors, light trickles in through Julie Mehretu’s window, which, from afar, has the grandeur of cathedral stained glass and, up close, breaks down into dynamic abstract shapes.
There’s a real feeling of joy throughout. I found myself, at one point in the museum, reading one of Obama’s handwritten school essays to the tune of “La Bamba,” playing nearby.
But a heaviness cuts through, too. One area reads almost like a Trump-administration hit list: You move from panels about the Paris Climate Agreement and the Iran nuclear deal to a display about “welcoming new Americans.” Nearby, a worn-down sneaker from a migrant who attempted to cross the southern border slouches in a display case.
From the museum’s first room, you get the sense that the United States is being treated here as something malleable. It’s a humble telling, and a contrast to the Trumpian version of history, which has a way of deifying the Founding Fathers and promises a return to a vague, but great, past.
At the Obama Center, next to a display of the Declaration of Independence, for instance, wall text immediately calls out the “founding contradictions” implicit in the document, which declared equality but would create a country that denied rights to many. It features, beside it, an 1829 petition from the Cherokee Nation to Congress trying to stop efforts to abolish their government. The room then goes into the history of social movements—against slavery, for women’s suffrage—that expanded freedoms. The theme of the country as an ongoing project continues throughout, even when discussing the Obama administration. Some wall texts are labeled The work that remained and describe shortfalls of Obama-era policies and ambitions, such as the Affordable Care Act or eradicating nuclear weapons.
The president “wanted to ensure that the narrative was as balanced as we could make it,” Louise Bernard, the museum’s director, told me. Each panel “speaks to what the president actually couldn’t accomplish, which is a reminder that democracy is always a work in progress.”
It’s not just democracy that remains a work in progress—so, too, does history. Bernard and Naftali both noted that presidential museums tend to start with the most positive version of the president’s story, and evolve to complicate that story over the years. The Obama Center, then, will have to wrestle with one of its namesake’s promises: change.
For now, the glossy new center, for many, will be a resonant antidote during a dark moment. Some critics have likened the center’s architecture to a sci-fi lair or prison, but I didn’t see it on my visit, maybe because the “moody” building, as the building’s architects described it, was having a good day. When I looked out at the plaza at midday, the granite was so drenched in light, so blindingly bright, I had to put on sunglasses to make out a statue of the Obamas, waving cheerily below.