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As the Obama Presidential Center marks its grand opening today, the 51�Թ� recognizes four Captiva Residency alumni/ae whose newly commissioned works help define this major civic and cultural project.

Rauschenberg’s connection to the Obama legacy began at the White House, where his 1998 work Early Bloomer [Anagram (A Pun)] was installed in the Old Family Dining Room during the Obama administration. Introduced through Michelle Obama’s 2013 Celebration of American Art and later opened to public view, the work marked a pivotal expansion of contemporary art within the Executive Residence. A reflection of the administration’s commitment to the arts can be seen in the Museum at the Obama Presidential Center, which highlights a digital version of the Rauschenberg painting.

Today, Rauschenberg’s legacy endures through the artists shaping the vision of the Obama Presidential Center. Four of the Center’s commissioned artists—María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Theaster Gates, Jack Pierson, and Carrie Mae Weems—participated in the 51�Թ�’s Captiva Residency program, reflecting a shared lineage grounded in interdisciplinary practice and cultural exchange. Their presence highlights the lasting impact of Rauschenberg’s commitment to the artistic community, extending his influence into a new civic institution grounded in the same values in which he believed.

We are honored to share more about them here.

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Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons (Residency 21, 2016)

María Magdalena Campos-Pons, who studied at the Escuela Nacional de Arte in Havana and later at the Instituto Superior de Arte, lives and works in Nashville. Her multidisciplinary practice spans photography, installation, performance, and video, exploring themes of migration, memory, gender, and Afro-Cuban identity, often rooted in her family history and the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade. Known for richly symbolic, large-scale photographic works and immersive installations, she has exhibited widely, including at the Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of African Art, and the Havana Biennial.

Her ongoing engagement with memory, cultural identity, and the layering of histories connects to her commission at the Obama Presidential Center. Still Holding the Scent of Flowers reimagines the White House Rose Garden as a “firework of diversities.” Through an assemblage of floral and edible plant forms, the installation engages themes of cultural plurality, memory, and renewal, while invoking Michelle Obama’s advocacy around food and health. Both celebratory and elegiac, the work reflects on the garden’s transformation, framing it as a site of preservation, loss, and enduring symbolic resonance.

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Theaster Gates (Residency 23, 2017)

Theaster Gates engages with the creative recirculation of art world capital and reconsiders the socially prescribed value of Black space and everyday materials through urban planning, cultural preservation, and collective imagination. Working across sculpture, installation, performance, and land art, Gates brings together art and civic engagement to explore how history, labor, and spirituality shape Black experience and possibility.

51�Թ�al to Gates's practice is his custodianship and critical redeployment of culturally significant objects, archives, and places. Rooted in Chicago’s South Side, his nonprofit artistic project, Rebuild 51�Թ�, has turned vacant buildings into vibrant cultural hubs, including the Stony Island Arts Bank, The Land School, Kenwood Gardens, Dorchester Art + Housing Collaborative, the 6 Flat, and Archive House and Listening House. Each project serves as a living artwork that fosters experimental artistic practice, creative entrepreneurship, access, education, and economic vitality while preserving Black cultural heritage.

Extending his practice of preservation and community-centered storytelling into a civic context, Gates’ contribution to the Obama Presidential Center takes shape at a monumental scale. Gates has created a landmark public installation for the Hadiya Pendleton Atrium that draws upon photographs from the Johnson Publishing Company archive and the collection of photographer Howard Simmons. Celebrating Black Chicago's legacy of creativity, resilience, and self-determination, the work reflects Gates' longstanding practice of preserving and recontextualizing historical archives, transforming them into powerful expressions of collective memory and civic possibility. At more than 175 feet long, the installation will serve as a focal point of the Center's public gathering space, honoring the communities and individuals whose contributions have shaped Chicago and American culture.

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Jack Pierson (Pilot Residency 1, 2012)

Jack Pierson employs photography, collage, sculptural assemblage and installation in pursuit of love, longing, kinship, poetry, celebration, youth, fantasy and identity. The artist’s mode of non-hierarchical cultural compilation and a process of impulse-led editing allows Pierson to create personal and universal narratives across his multidisciplinary practice.

Pierson’s move to New York following stints in Miami and Los Angeles saw the evolution of staging in his work. Depicting recollections of autobiographical nights out and days in the studio, he constructed melancholic sets of half-remembered experiences and occasional, ironic gestures of self-portraiture. His first word sculptures, composed of discarded signage letters removed from their intended context, were built from materials found on the streets of New York’s East Village and introduced a multiplicity of meaning into Pierson’s practice.

These themes carry through to his commission at the Obama Presidential Center. Jack Pierson’s HOPE is a word sculpture composed of found letters and positioned at the visitor check-in desk in the museum’s entry pavilion. Drawing on the artist’s longstanding use of nostalgic Americana, the work reinterprets one of President Obama’s defining campaign messages, anchoring it within the Center’s broader initiative of more than 25 site-specific public art commissions across its 19-acre campus in Chicago’s Jackson Park.

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Carrie Mae Weems (Residency 10, 2015)

Carrie Mae Weems, a conceptual artist, unpacks and confronts constructions of race and femininity in the pursuit of new models by which to live. Grounded in the specificity of her lived experience as a Black woman but universal in its explorations of family relationships, cultural identity, power structures and social hierarchy, her artistic practice is primarily photographic but also incorporates text, fabric, audio, installation, and video. Informed by narrative storytelling, folkloric traditions and the observational methodologies of the social sciences, her approach to image-making ranges from staged and serialized narrative to appropriation and adaptation of archival and ethnographic imagery. Weems takes aim at the complicity of the photographic medium in propagating dehumanizing tropes and the historical omission of Black women from fine art institutions and canons. Weems lives in Syracuse, New York with her husband Jeffrey Hoone and is currently the Artist in Residence at Syracuse University.

This commitment to interrogating history, representation, and collective memory continues in her commission at the Obama Presidential Center. Weems’ installation, The Cool Blue Wind, is presented alongside an original musical composition and incorporates photographic elements that reference President Obama’s landmark 2008 election. The work draws on the spirit of jazz and its balance of structure and improvisation to evoke themes of freedom, memory, and civic engagement.