Reviewed

A Day at the Museum With the Obama Portraits, Basquiat, and Bisa Butler

Nonperformative diversity is a game-changer for Chicago’s Art Institute

Kehinde Wiley. “Barack Obama, 2018.” Oil on canvas. Image: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

The Obama portraits are home in Chicago, as they should be. Don’t get me wrong. I fully understand that the Smithsonian National Gallery of Art serves as caretaker for the life-size presidential portraits by Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald, but there is something truly special about going to the Art Institute of Chicago to see a well-designed, spacious, brightly lit exhibition of the Black-artist-created imagery of former President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama in the city that made them.

I remember when these portraits were revealed and placed on display in February 2018 in Washington, D.C. Everyone I knew wanted to go or had gone. We were thrilled to see Black artists selected and celebrated with these odes to the first Black president and first lady—the first Black couple to occupy the White House that enslaved people were forced to build. That I visited the portraits on June 18, the first full day after the government opted to make Juneteenth a federal holiday, was a happy synchronicity. It seemed to make sense: the Obama portraits in Chicago, just a half-block away from where we had sat in Grant Park on an unseasonably…