Chicago murals: These artists created the murals for the Obama Presidential Center’s baskeball court

When folks from the upcoming Obama Presidential Center call with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to display your art, you figure out how to get it done.

Artists Sam Kirk and Dorian Sylvain were asked to team up on a mural in the center’s basketball court, and collaboration came easily. It helps when you’re friends whose work complements each other, and together you can navigate the security and privacy requirements that come with creating a piece for the former president.

The hard part? They’re used to painting in public, right where the art will live, not remotely for installation elsewhere. “We’re used to seeing things going on around the work,” said Kirk, who lives in Little Village.

For this project, Sylvain drew with colored pencil on tissue paper, Kirk digitized the drawings, added her own efforts and put the final work into a file that installers could blow up and reproduce to hang along the center’s Home Court gym floor. Then, they hoped for the best.

“I’m a nervous wreck,” Sylvain, of Hyde Park, said before she’d seen the finished mural in person.

The gym is an addition that Barack Obama didn’t have during his White House days. During his presidency, he would play basketball on the White House tennis courts, where portable basketball hoops were installed. The court at the Obama Presidential Center is open to visitors to view, though only community members who are part of sports and well-being programs can arrange to use the court.

The mural, titled “Pass It Forward,” also reflects the role of sports in Obama’s presidency, the women said. Known for his support of women’s sports, Obama met with the Chicago Sky women’s basketball team in 2022, following their WNBA championship the season before.

Obama looks at discipline and athleticism that come with sports and “how that translates into life,” Sylvain said. “The choice that they made to commission Sam and I is rooted in our practice as community artists. I find the building and the philosophy behind it really resonates with what we do naturally. To see the public in it is definitely going to be our highlight.”

Sylvain and Kirk said they hope to sit on the bleachers and take it all in after the center and gym open.

“We worked really hard on it,” Sylvain said. “It’s big. It’s stunning. It’s great when you walk in that room and you see it.”

The mural is composed of two parts that run parallel to each other and, together, make up the bigger picture. On either side, two girls are holding the ends of double Dutch jump ropes, a nod to girls playing in parks around the South Side. The basketball players in the middle represent men and women of a variety of ages and races, like those found on courts around the city.

The main character’s basketball jersey includes symbols and patterns like those found in African fabrics and Asian communities, the women said. The pattern drawn into the basketball hoop pulls from indigenous communities. The color palette of the entire mural leans Afro-centric, along with black and white patterns common in Latin America and with the Mexican Aztecs.

The women were contacted by curator Virginia Shore at the Obama Presidential Center to create the piece, and went back and forth with the team there on edits as their work progressed, Kirk said. That team was then in touch with the former president.

“Sam and I are over the moon about being two of 30 artists” who were selected to create original pieces for the center, Sylvain said. Nearly 30 large-scale works were commissioned for the four-building complex on the South Side in Jackson Park. The center is intended to be a place for youth and community to gather — themes the two women sought to include in their mural.

A detail that surprised both artists when they viewed the mural during the installation “was how beautifully it integrated to the exterior landscape,” visible through the adjacent floor-to-ceiling windows, Sylvain said.

Namely, “it is wild how it complements the playground directly outside,” Kirk said.

“The playground, the landscaping, it all merged so beautifully and completely,” Sylvain added.

“The home court building was such a great space for us to be in. That would be a great space where a lot of community comes through. Our work is so much about community and creating community,” Kirk said.