Working for the Common Good. The Obama Presidential Center Museum, 2026.
<Toward a More Perfect Union and Power of Words The Obama Presidential Center Museum, 2026. Photograph courtesy of the Obama Foundation.
From Grant Park to Jackson Park.
On November 4, 2008, I joined hundreds of thousands of fellow Chicagoans in Grant Park for Barack Obama’s election night victory speech. Ten years later, in a full-circle moment, I was invited to apply for a contract position as an image researcher for the team developing the Obama Presidential Museum in nearby Jackson Park.
From 2019 to 2026, I served as Image & Media Acquisition Specialist for the Obama Presidential Center Museum. As a research consultant, I took direction from curatorial and design teams at the Obama Foundation and Ralph Applebaum Associates, as well as media producers at batwin+robin. The work was complex, with a large number of stakeholders, and, as on any project of this scale, every exhibit and media piece was painstakingly edited and re-edited through many phases of development.
My primary source for images and video was the National Archives, which holds the Presidential Records at the Barack Obama Presidential Library. But since the Museum’s exhibits span a wide range of topics, so I also dug into the pictorial and media holdings of news organizations, university archives, collecting institutions, and stock agencies. Freelance photographers and filmmakers, especially those who had worked on Barack Obama’s campaigns, were another valuable resource. In all, I connected with many hundreds of collections and creators.
After the Museum’s groundbreaking in 2021, as construction progressed and exhibitions and media were finalized, my work shifted to negotiating terms of use and fees with creators and copyright holders. I worked closely with the Foundation’s Legal team and our consulting partners to procure more than five thousand unique assets for the Museum’s displays.
