06/27/2026
Girls’ Club collection artist Aliza Nisenbaum // her work, Silk Scarf, 2025, in the collection and a newly commisioned mural at the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago
Via news.artnet.com:
“The OPC’s library, meanwhile, is the latest addition to the Chicago Public Library system. A characteristically colorful mural by Queens-based painter Aliza Nisenbaum watches over its main reading room. At 70 feet-long, this is Nisenbaum’s largest mural yet. “It’s a very different type of work,” she said on a video call. Her portraits often include elements of social practice in terms of the relationships she builds with sitters. Some figures here hail from that archive, “coming together in an imagined collective,” she said. Others are famous writers. Nisenbaum appears twice.
Details abound, informed by Nisenbaum’s formative years at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and visits to the city’s libraries. The kente textiles of Barack Obama Sr.’s native Kenya appear. So do flowers from Mexico, Nisenbaum’s homeland. Perhaps most interestingly, she has equated the stages of learning with the times of day, progressing from left to right.
“I was thinking of seeds, and how President Obama would talk about dreams,” she said. “Things are planted, then we come together and we discuss ideas, and through a synthesis, we come up with new ideas together, and then we go into our own dreams and our own personal individual space.”
Aliza Nisenbaum Anton Kern Gallery ARTnews Obama Presidential Library Chicago Public Library School of the Art Institute of Chicago Alumni
