Obama Presidential Center Museum

Opening to the public on Juneteenth 2026, the Obama Presidential Center Museum in Chicago’s Jackson Park features four levels of exhibits across nearly 35,000 square feet. The Museum presents the remarkable story of President and Mrs. Obama, America’s first Black president and First Lady, through a journey about history, democracy, public service, and the power of people to create change. Across the Museum’s four exhibit levels, visitors explore the promise and complexity of American democracy, the formative experiences that shaped President and Mrs. Obama, the work of the Obama presidency, and the continuing responsibility we all share in building a more perfect union.

The multilayered visitor journey unfolds through four major exhibition levels: Toward a More Perfect Union, Working for the Common Good, The People’s House, and We the People. Together, these galleries move visitors from the nation's founding ideals and unfinished work, through the people, movements, policies, challenges, and accomplishments that shaped the Obama presidency, and into the urgent civic questions of today and tomorrow. Through artifacts, large-scale and immersive media, storytelling, and hands-on digital and analog interactives, the Museum connects history to action, inviting visitors to see democracy as a living practice shaped by ordinary people working together.

Obama Presidential Center

Exhibition highlights include Power of Words, a soaring 88-foot-tall media canvas of speech, sound, image, poetry, and art reveals how words can inspire action and move people toward change, and Toward a More Perfect Union, an illuminated, prismatic opening gallery connecting the nation’s founding ideals and contradictions to the people and movements that have pushed American democracy toward greater justice and inclusion. The Yes We Can Campaign circular gallery showcases a panoramic media installation featuring volunteer voices, alongside crowd-sourced campaign objects, immerses visitors in the grassroots movement of 2008, while Democracy 101 features a hands-on civics exhibit that helps visitors explore how democracy works through approachable, interactive experiences that build knowledge, confidence, and participation.

Panorama of a Presidency is a sweeping media room that surrounds visitors with a behind-the-scenes view into the many activities and places that together comprise the daily work of the presidency. On a smaller scale, detailed miniature White House rooms offer a playful, intimate look at how the Obamas opened the People’s House through traditions, celebrations, performances, and public programs, while Life in the White House Artifacts offer a rich collection of fashion, state gifts, and sports memorabilia that reveal how the Obamas made the White House feel open, inclusive, personal, and reflective of America’s diversity and vibrancy as they sought to uphold and expand a variety of traditions.

Imagine Your Impact is a recurring interactive thread across all levels of the Museum, culminating in a shared media experience with a large-scale digital art commission that invites visitors to see how individual actions can join together to create collective change. Contemporary artwork is woven throughout the museum — in addition to Norman Teague’s custom-designed benches, commissioned works by artists including Jeffrey Gibson, Jules Julien, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons bring layered visual expressions of identity and hope into the experience.

Inclusive design plays a foundational role in the design. Designed to support visitors of all ages and abilities, the Museum integrates accessible, multisensory experiences from tactile stations and replicas to captioning, ASL interpretation, audio description, assistive listening, clear wayfinding, and interactive opportunities for participation.

At its heart, the Museum is a story about possibility: what becomes possible when ordinary people organize, participate, lead, listen, and act in common purpose. The exhibits place President and Mrs. Obama’s journey within a broader American civic narrative—one rooted in the South Side of Chicago, shaped by national and global movements for justice, and carried forward by the people who continue to make change in their communities, including participants in the Obama Foundation’s Global Programs. Visitors leave with a deeper understanding of the Obamas’ legacy and a renewed sense of their own agency in the ongoing work of democracy at home and abroad.