The June opening of the Obama Presidential Center unveiled dozens of commissioned art installations to the public, including seven pieces created by artists who have ties to the Rhode Island School of Design.
These artists include Tyanna Buie, professor and graduate program director in printmaking at RISD, alums Spencer Finch, Julie Mehretu and Jenny Holzer, and honorary degree recipients María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Theaster Gates and Nick Cave.
“I selected artists based on the strength of their artistic practices and their alignment with the Obamas’ belief in civic engagement, community empowerment and the transformative potential of culture,” Virginia Shore, the curator of the Obama Presidential Center Art Commissions, wrote in a statement to the Herald.
Shore noted that she looked for artists that would push boundaries through “scale, material experimentation or new modes of audience engagement.”
The Herald spoke with Buie and Finch about their experiences developing art for the center.
Buie created “Be the Change!” for the center, a screenprinted piece featuring three panels on a background with images and news clippings of former President Barack Obama.
She was first contacted by Shore to present samples of her work for an unknown project in the summer of 2023 and was officially commissioned in the spring of 2024. While she worked on the piece, she could not talk about its intended purpose until the center announced it in early 2026.
The piece, which is set to be displayed in the center’s Democracy in Action Lab, was inspired by Buie’s “own start into democracy,” she said. While conceiving the piece, she reflected on her time campaigning for Obama’s 2005 Senate run, when she participated in his float at Chicago’s Bud Billiken parade.
“And so I was like, ‘why don’t we go back to … what got me excited and fired up for the future of what this country could be?’” she said. “That’s where the work came in.”
Shore noted that she was first introduced to Buie’s work through a colleague a couple of years ago. “Looking at her art — seeing the layered histories and beautiful, colored grids — was captivating enough,” Shore wrote in an email to The Herald. “But reading about her personal history, including her connection to the Obamas at the Bud Billiken Parade, made it feel like destiny.”
The first panel features a megaphone, which represents the possibility for change through using your voice despite barriers to going out and voting, Buie explained. The second panel features a clipboard and a phone open to Change.org, which she said was inspired by the change you can make as a volunteer. The third has a voting box to represent the importance of voting.
These depictions were inspired by Buie’s experience teaching a class called “Printmaking and the Politics of Protest,” where she explored the many ways to create change.
“It’s not for us to tell somebody their form of protest isn’t good enough,” she said. “Let’s focus on what you can be doing.”
Now that the center is officially open, Buie said she has enjoyed watching the public experience the work, especially because of its medium.
“I think it’s rare for a contemporary printmaker who’s not world renowned to have a piece in such a public facing place that’s just purely screen printing,” she said.
Buie finds that the students and culture at RISD “shape the way” she makes her art. “(The students) push themselves, but they also think bigger in a way that constantly challenges me as the instructor to think about my work bigger,” Buie said.
Finch, who received his MFA in sculpture from RISD in 1989, created “Memory Landscape,” a display of ceramic tiles representing four cities to which Obama has a connection.
He was contacted by Shore around six years ago after working with her on previous projects. He then began working with Obama to determine what kind of project to create for the center.
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“We worked closely on several concepts over the years. Spencer was included in the first official presentation; I presented to President Obama, the architects and the OPC executive leadership in June of 2019,” wrote Shore.
Finch was inspired by Obama’s first book, “Dreams from My Father,” which describes Obama’s formative experiences and his time living around the world. Finch selected four cities that were important to Obama’s upbringing to represent in the art: Honolulu, Jakarta, Chicago and Nairobi.
Obama chose colors to represent his memories of the cities, and Finch used the four colors to create a layout based on an abstraction of each memory landscape, he said. The piece is located in the lower level lobby of the center.
Finch said that as a RISD student, he was exposed to a variety of ways of working and thinking about art.
“I started doing lots of experimental work with different media when I was there, which was such a wonderful, wonderful learning experience, and I just took so much information and possibility in,” he said.
Finch remembers the culture at RISD being “very exciting,” he said. “I was exposed to great teachers. I was exposed to great classmates. There were so many interesting people in the program working.”
Izabella Piatkowski is a senior staff writer covering the Rhode Island School of Design.