The Obamas: Springing Forth — Njideka Akunyili Crosby and the Portrait That Was Always Coming
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On 14 June 2026, the Obama Presidential Center unveiled "The Obamas: Springing Forth" — a large-scale work by Njideka Akunyili Crosby, rendered in acrylic, coloured pencils, charcoal, and transfers on paper, measuring 108 by 120 inches. It now hangs in the Hope and Change Lobby of the museum's main building, free and open to the public, before the Centre's official grand opening on Juneteenth.
It is the first official portrait of the former President and First Lady together.
Akunyili Crosby was born in Nigeria in 1983. She is the daughter of the late Dora Akunyili — Director-General of NAFDAC, Nigeria's formidable drug and food regulator, a woman who became a national institution in her own right. Njideka earned her MFA from Yale in 2011, won the MacArthur Fellowship in 2017, and is represented by David Zwirner and Victoria Miro. She is Los Angeles-based. She has been, for some years now, among the most significant painters working anywhere in the world.
None of that is new information. What is new is this: she has now made the defining institutional portrait of the most consequential American presidency of the twenty-first century.
The work does what Akunyili Crosby's work always does — layers personal and historical imagery into a surface that rewards sustained looking. To prepare the commission, her studio spent months inside the Obamas' world: reading the books, revisiting the interviews, moving through archival footage, mapping the coordinates of two lives. The result is a portrait that holds public and private in the same frame. Michelle Obama's childhood home on Euclid Avenue appears in the background, her father's 1970 bronze Buick Electra 225 parked out front. The arched window behind the figures echoes the geometry of the Oval Office, the carved relief of the Resolute Desk is there–So is Martin Luther King Jr. Akunyili Crosby photographed the couple herself; the portrait begins from that image.
"It's us — and all of the stories within the story," Michelle Obama said, standing before the canvas.
That sentence is, in its way, also a description of what Akunyili Crosby has been building across her entire practice. Her signature photo-transfer technique — layering photographic imagery beneath and within paint — has always been a method for holding multiple histories simultaneously: Nigerian domestic life, American inheritance, diasporic memory, the personal archive as political text. She did not change her method for this commission, instead, she brought her method to it. The portrait of the Obamas is, in this sense, continuous with every painting she has made before it.
There is something worth sitting with in the specific geography of this commission. The Obama Presidential Center is built on the South Side — the neighbourhood that raised Michelle Obama, that shaped the political imagination of a president, that has been, for decades, a site of both profound neglect and profound cultural production. Akunyili Crosby's portrait does not look away from that. The childhood home is in the frame. The Buick is in the frame. The neighbourhood is in the frame.
The Obamas stood before it in silence first. "Before we get any commentary in," Barack Obama said, "we've got to soak it in."
That pause matters. It means the painting requires it. It means the painting gives you enough to need time with it.The portrait will outlast the news cycle that greeted it. It was built to.
"The Obamas: Springing Forth" (2026) is on view in the Hope and Change Lobby, Obama Presidential Center, Chicago. The museum opens to the public 19 June 2026.