Inside Chicago’s Obama Center
Italian art workers announce a nationwide strike, New York’s Penn Station to feature Trump’s name, and have you heard about the “Obamalisk”?
Penn Station in New York City is notoriously Kafkaesque and claustrophobic. It's an urban nightmare, a transit purgatory, and a place to avoid at all costs. To make matters worse, the renovated station might carry Trump's name and be designed in his favorite neoclassical style, according to reports. More about that below.
Also, do you remember the historic strike that brought the Venice Biennale to a halt in May? Italian cultural workers are planning to expand it to the entire country this week. They're not messing around. And there’s more, including a tour inside the newly unveiled Obama Presidential Center, dubbed the “Obamalisk” by locals.
—Hakim Bishara, editor-in-chief
A First Look at the Art in the New Obama Presidential Center
On a recent sunny morning, the blue skies and stretches of greenery made the formidably geometric “Obamalisk” building seem almost inviting. Over the last five years, the rolling hills of Jackson Park have been reshaped to accommodate the structures that now make up the Obama Presidential Center, set to open to the public later this month.
Spread across the new $850 million campus, the legacy of Barack and Michelle Obama is embodied in educational, recreational, and civic spaces. With works by Idris Khan, Maya Lin, and more, it will be a public art destination for Chicago’s South Side, if it can live up to its community. | Jen Torwudzo-Stroh
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Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969
Featuring live presentations, this exhibition grounds performance as the foundation of contemporary Native Art. On view at SITE Santa Fe June 5–September 7, 2026.
News
- Italian labor unions, cultural workers’ associations, and grassroots collectives have joined the call for a national strike across the country’s arts and culture sector this Friday, June 12 to demand better working conditions and show solidarity with Palestine.
- Renderings of the winning Penn Station redesign prominently feature Trump's name, raising questions and concerns.
Art Review
Sanford Wurmfeld's Unstable Geometry
From the beginning of his career, Sanford Wurmfeld has understood that looking is a temporal act, and has never stopped exploring the implications of that idea.
Having written about Wurmfeld previously, I was curious to learn more about his trajectory, which has long flown under the radar of the New York art world. Done between 1971 and ’74, the six paintings and one study in his exhibition, Squares 1971–74, at Ceysson & Bénétière gave me a fuller picture of Wurmfeld’s methodical and relentless investigation into color, as well as what distinguishes his work from other artists working in this area. | John Yau
Read MoreThe World That Held Peter Hujar and Paul Thek
The late photographer Peter Hujar and visual artist Paul Thek keep showing up these days. And now we have Andrew Durbin’s thoughtfully rendered dual biography of these lovers and friends: The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek.
This is neither a happily-ever-after romance nor an entirely tragic tale, though both men died of AIDS in the late 1980s. Instead, it feels more grounded in daily reality, more nuanced and ever-changing, holding the full complexity of queer relations with care and understanding. As a dyke, I particularly cherished this portrait of queer entanglement characterized by duration and valences beyond the sexual or romantic. | Alexis Clements
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Discover MA Arts and Cultural Enterprise at Central Saint Martins
Develop business skills for cultural management and production on this flexible, part-time online Masters.
From the Archive
The Quiet Dignity of Peter Hujar
Hujar wrote that his portrait subjects were “those who push themselves to any extreme” and those who “cling to the freedom to be themselves.” | Eileen G’Sell
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