Jenny Harris curating “Art of the Obama Years”
May 27, 2026
The Logan Center for the Arts announced today the exhibition Longer than the Sky: Art of the Obama Years, conceived and curated by doctoral candidate Jenny Harris and on view from July 10 until October 11. The exhibition is organized on the occasion of the opening of the Obama Presidential Center, designed like UChicago’s Logan Center by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien and located down the street. The Logan Center for the Arts will partner with the OPC on related programs that will take place during the exhibition.
The exhibition presents a constellation of around thirty works by an intergenerational group of artists, including Kevin Beasley, Rachel Harrison, Josh Kline, Louise Lawler, Catherine Opie, Pope.L, Cameron Rowland, Allan Sekula, Cauleen Smith, Hito Steyerl, and Jack Whitten, among others. Its 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 years 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.
