Longer Than the Sky: Art of the Obama Years

Longer Than the Sky: Art of the Obama Years is presented by Logan Center Exhibitions on the occasion of the opening of the Obama Presidential Center. The exhibition presents a constellation of around thirty works by an intergenerational group of artists, amounting to a significant sliver of art produced during the Obama Presidency. Longer Than the Sky charts a provisional art history of the recent past, featuring works by Kevin Beasley, Andrea Fraser, Rachel Harrison, Jacqueline Humphries, Josh Kline, Louise Lawler, Jason Lazarus, Ralph Lemon, Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall, Catherine Opie, Adrian Piper, Pope.L, Seth Price, Aliza Nisenbaum, Cameron Rowland, Allan Sekula, Cauleen Smith, Hito Steyerl, Diamond Stingily, Martine Syms, Danh Vo, Jack Whitten, and Amanda Williams among other artists. The exhibition’s title, Longer Than the Sky, comes from James Baldwin’s 1957 short story, “Sonny’s Blues,” and evokes the intermingling of optimism and despair that defined the period between 2008 and 2016. The story concludes when the younger of two brothers performs a stirring rendition of the blues, an event that carries the fleeting glimmer of hopefulness, even freedom. “I was yet aware that this was only a moment,” the narrator subsequently reflects, “that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.” Longer Than the Sky centers on artistic practices that gained relevance for the ways they engaged self-reflexively with their historical moment. These artworks have been assembled not for their stylistic similarities, but rather, for the ways they offer distinct perspectives on the circumstances in which they were made. While some address specific political events, the majority evoke their political context more obliquely, highlighting an overlapping set of social, technological, and aesthetic concerns that shaped the art of this era. Though the exhibition includes several artists who launched their careers in these years, it also foregrounds many who made period-defining work long before 2008. The prominence of the latter points to the ways these years were marked as much by continuity as they were by change and rupture. Opened in 2012 at the height of the Obama years, the Reva & David Logan Center for the Arts is part of this history. Its architects, Billie Tsien and Tod Williams, would go on to design the Obama Presidential Center down the street. Through its exhibitions and programs, the Logan Center has played a key role in supporting artistic communities on the South Side of Chicago. In keeping with this context, Longer Than the Sky situates the work of several Chicago-based artists within broader conversations about global contemporary art. Longer Than the Sky: Art of the Obama Years is presented by Logan Center Exhibitions and curated by Jenny Harris, doctoral candidate in Art History at the University of Chicago, who partnered with the Logan Center in 2024 to co-curate the exhibition Jessica Stockholder: For Events. The Logan Center is pleased to partner with the Obama Presidential Center on related programs that will take place during the exhibition. Exhibition-related programs will be developed in partnership with Dorian Sylvain, an artist and curator who has frequently partnered with the Logan Center and was commissioned by The Obama Foundation to develop a collaborative site-specific mural at the Obama Presidential Center’s Home Court. Exhibition and programming support has been provided by the Ng Family Visiting Artist Fund, the Revada Foundation, and Friends of the Logan Center.