THE AWE-INSPIRING poetry of Langston Hughes informed a floral abstract painting with a rich and varied blue background by Lindsay Adams (b. 1990). “Weary Blues” shares the title of the Harlem poet’s iconic 1925 work. The poem speaks of the transformative power of blues music.
Employing his signature simple and accessible language, Hughes recalls hearing the profoundly effective music of a piano player in a Lenox Avenue nightclub on a recent night. “Droning a drowsy syncopated tune. Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon, I heard a Negro play,” Hughes wrote. “To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.” A century later, Adams’s Hughes-inspired work will be installed at the forthcoming Obama Presidential Center.
LINDSAY ADAMS, ‘”Weary Blues,” 2024 (oil on canvas, 24 x 24 inches). | Courtesy the Artist
On Chicago’s South Side, the Obama Presidential Center is rising in Jackson Park. The 19.3-acre campus, which includes a museum and a branch of the Chicago Public Library, has been under construction since 2021 and is expected to be completed in 2026. One of the highlights of the long-awaited center, art is designed to be central to the visitor experience with 25 original commissions planned.
“Weary Blues” by Adams, an MFA candidate at the Art Institute of Chicago, and a tile wall mural installation by New York artist Spencer Finch inspired by President Obama’s biography “Dreams from My Father,” are the latest site-specific commissions announced by the Obama Foundation
“Both Spencer and Lindsay bring a strong sense of place and purpose to their work that accomplishes President Obama’s goal for the arts on campus: to spark conversations about the world as it is and the world as it ought to be,” Obama Presidential Center Museum Director Louise Bernard said in a statement. “We look forward to working with Lindsay and Spencer in the coming weeks as they join us onsite to install their work, and sharing their pieces with visitors next year.”
“Weary Blues is a meditation on fatigue, beauty, and the quiet persistence of form. Loosely held florals drift in and out of focus, suspended in a dusk-like atmosphere where color pools and dissolves. The painting leans into the language of the blues—its sorrow, its swell, its slow-burning resistance.”
— Lindsay Adams
Previously, the center announced commissions by Richard Hunt (1935-2023), Maya Lin, and Julie Mehretu. Hunt’s “Book Bird” sculpture by will be featured in the Library Reading Garden and Lin’s “Seeing Through the Universe” sculpture will be displayed in the Ann Dunham Water Garden, named in honor of Obama’s mother. Put in place earlier this year, a towering, stained-glass window by Mehretu was the third artist commission announced by the Obama Foundation and the first work to be installed.
Finch’s “To Disappear Enhances – (Memory Landscapes)” is informed by key places of significance to Obama as he was coming of age and finding his footing early in his professional life, including Honolulu, Jakarta, Chicago, and Nairobi. The colorful, tiled mural will be installed in the lower-level lobby of the Forum building—a welcoming commons space that houses an auditorium, restaurant, and an array of programming, gathering, creative, and collaborative spaces.
Lindsay Adams visiting Obama Presidential Center, 2025. | Photo by Akilah Townsend, Courtesy The Obama Foundation
Panel for Obama Presidential Center, Adapted from “Weary Blues” (2024) by Lindsay Adams. | Courtesy The Obama Foundation
A CHICAGO-BASED WRITER AND PAINTER, Adams was born in Washington, D.C. She brings a diverse and dynamic lens to her artistic practice. Dual undergraduate degrees in world politics and diplomacy and Latin and Iberian studies from the University of Richmond inform her MFA studies. “Embracing her intersectional identity as a Black woman with Cerebral Palsy, Adams’s art serves as both a reflection and extension of self,” according to her biography, “challenging narratives of race and representation while exploring personal and collective histories.”
In 2024, Adams received a Helen Frankenthaler Award. “Lindsay Adams: Keep Your Wonder Moving,” a solo exhibition of the artist was presented at Sean Kelly Gallery in Los Angeles, earlier this year. “Lindsay Adams: All water has a perfect memory” is currently on view at Patron Gallery in Chicago, through June 14. Referencing another literary giant, the title of the Patron Gallery exhibition is taken from a line in Toni Morrison’s essay “The Site of Memory.”
In a statement, Adams explained the meaning and symbolism embedded in her Hughes-inspired work commissioned for the Obama center:
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Weary Blues is a meditation on fatigue, beauty, and the quiet persistence of form. Loosely held florals drift in and out of focus, suspended in a dusk-like atmosphere where color pools and dissolves. The painting leans into the language of the blues—its sorrow, its swell, its slow-burning resistance. Here, gesture becomes a kind of mourning, and color a vessel for memory. What wilts does not vanish, but transforms—bending toward something tender, bruised, and still becoming.”.
“Weary Blues” was made by Adams in 2024. The 24 x 24 inch painting will be reproduced on silk-screen panels creating a horizontal installation that will grace a prominent wall in the center’s cafe, which is located in the museum building.
“It is my privilege to translate ‘Weary Blues’ for the Obama Presidential Center,” Adams said. “The piece will become part of a shared environment at the Center’s café— an atmosphere for gathering, reflection, and rest—extending the piece’s emotional tenor into a communal space rooted in legacy, resilience, and imagination. It’s an honor to contribute to the rich tradition of Black artistic expression on Chicago’s South Side and to help carry that creative legacy forward.” CT
FIND MORE about Lindsay Adams on her website and Instagram
BOOKSHELF
The monograph “Richard Hunt” and exhibition catalog “Julie Mehretu” are key recent volumes surveying the career of each artist. Also consider, “Julie Mehretu: Ensemble” and “Julie Mehretu: A Transcore of the Radical Imaginatory.” Several Langston Hughes volumes feature the poem The Weary Blues, including “The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes,” “Where the Jazz Band Plays – The Weary Blues – Poetry by Langston Hughes,” and “The Weary Blues.” In addition, “The Obama Portraits” is about the “making, meaning, and significance” of the Presidential and First Lady portraits commissioned by the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery and painted by Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald, respectively.
