CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — The Barack Obama Presidential Library is open in Hyde Park, Illinois. Not the official presidential library, which won’t be completed for years, but a Barack Obama Presidential Library exhibit at the Hyde Park Free Theater, a new storefront community arts center.
Curated by Jorge Lucero, a professor of art education at the University of Illinois School of Art and Design, the exhibit operates on the philosophy that anything and everything counts. The exhibit includes stories from Hyde Park residents who remember Obama from long before he ran for office, opinions about how he has handled issues such as immigration reform, and evidence of Obama’s love for the Chicago Bulls.
The director of the theater approached Lucero about working on an art project that also involved education. The location of the Obama presidential library came up in conversation, and Lucero jokingly said, “Why don’t we just open it here?”
Then he started thinking about it.
“It really made me think about the way histories are constructed, particularly a president’s history, who has an enormous cult of personality, and how that person’s story gets told,” Lucero said.
He decided to invite people to share their thoughts and stories of the president, the sorts of things that won’t be found in the official presidential library. He invited community members and artists to share artifacts – either handmade or readymade objects that had some significance to their thoughts about the president, whether favorable or critical.
Lucero also worked with 150 students at Walter Payton College Preparatory High School in Chicago. Part of his work with them was an object-making workshop. But the objects were just a means to tell a story. Lucero considers the more important part of the work to be the discussions he had with the students about the educational placards that accompany the objects that are part of museum exhibits, and how the personal histories of public figures are written.
“We were trying to think about those labels in a critical way, in a way that reveals their power,” he said.
“One of the things that was really important was allowing the people who submitted the artifacts to write the museum labels themselves,” Lucero said. “Instead of being written by some anonymous authority figure that was supposed to be objective and the voice of truth, I decided to hand that back to the people. They contain some factual information, but also personal narratives.”
As an example, Lucero created his own artifact, a copy of the DREAM Act, which establishes provisions for undocumented minors to gain citizenship. In the placard, Lucero wrote about a moment from his childhood when he saw his father detained by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and his and his mother’s panic.
Some pieces in the exhibit are critical of the way Obama has handled immigration reform and of the use of drones by the military. A high school student wrote about her experience as a child of being in a ballet class with one of Obama’s daughters.
A U. of I. graduate student in art education, Albert Stabler, submitted a project looking at race and the presidency, in the form of statistics detailing the massive rise in death threats against the president after Obama took office. His artifact is a piece of cardboard into which he carved five tweets that threatened the president.
On the lighter side, Chicago artist Alberto Aguilar’s submission described a stone in Hyde Park with a metal placard on it, memorializing the first kiss between Barack and Michelle Obama.
Visitors to the museum usually laugh at the prospect of this exhibit as the Obama presidential library, Lucero said.
“It’s like any type of parody,” he said. “The first thing they do is laugh, but then they seem to reflect.
“It’s weird to have something so public that involves the entire nation, and to have this microversion of it with people who have had personal contact with the president,” Lucero said. “For me, it’s interesting that it started as a curiosity. It’s interesting to see what these stories would look like next to each other. It seems to have ignited a conversation about what happens when you do it quickly and cheaply and allow anybody and everybody to be part of it.
“As much as it’s a parody, it’s meant to be serious. It’s sort of cheeky and funny, but, to a certain degree, it’s very serious.”
The presidential library exhibit will be open through Aug. 31 at The Hyde Park Free Theater, 1448 E. 57th St., Chicago. The community center will host discussions and performances throughout the summer related to the “Barack Obama Presidential Library” exhibit.