On a mid-morning weekday in his light-filled studio on the West Side, the furniture designer Norman Teague runs his hands along one of his latest creations in wood.
“I’ve enjoyed walnut because of its softness, but it’s also dense,” says Teague, who is surrounded by objects he’s made over the years, including wood tables and sculptures, plastic and ceramic vessels and many, many chairs. “So it’s soft and strong at the same time. These benches will take a beating.”
These benches are the benches, ones the designer made for the Obama Presidential Center that provide a place to relax in a section of the eight-story museum tower. There are nine in all, though this one, the prototype, Teague will keep for himself.
Teague has earned that prize. He’s been working with the Center, first as a consultant then as a designer, for almost 10 years. Over that same time his profile as a designer and artist has soared. In 2023 he was selected to represent the United States in the Venice Biennale of Architecture. The following year he had two major solo exhibitions, “Designer’s Choice: Norman Teague—Jam Sessions” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and “A Love Supreme” at the Elmhurst Art Museum. One of his ceramic pieces was sold through the Walker Art Museum’s design shop, Idea House 3.
Closer to home his wide-ranging practice has flourished, primarily focusing on bespoke and retail furniture but also extending into public art installations, commercial wares and custom interiors for clients including Bronzeville Winery and The Silver Room. Teague’s designs have been featured in the Chicago Architectural Biennial and the Art Institute of Chicago’s exhibition “Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of PanAfrica.”
The Obama benches, however, involved another level of ambition. “It was definitely one of the most precious projects we’ve ever had to care for,” says Teague.
The seat of each bench is composed from pieces of walnut joined together to form a long angular slab, steadily widening from one end to the other and cantilevered over its wooden base. Teague formed the seat and back using stacked planks of walnut in differing shades and shifting grains, from light brown to near ebony, creating movement across what at first glance looks like a smooth, uninterrupted surface.
A series of rolling dividers, like small rippling waves, emerge as if rising up out of the seat, a design element that has already invoked different interpretations.
“People are like, ‘Oh, you put the dividers in so you could keep people from going to sleep,’ but they’re actually to help people get up,” asserts Teague. “So for the elder people that need something more, that gives them a little assistance.”
Teague also intentionally varied the space between the dividers and the depth of the bench, to accommodate different sized bodies. He thinks these elements, a thoughtful response to requirements of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), also serve to elevate the furniture, like the way their pedestals are lit.
“There’s a string of light that runs underneath [the seat] so it really glows. It’s pretty stunning the way they’ve kind of placed it.”
The benches will provide a place to watch footage of President Obama’s 2015 speech “You are America,” delivered to mark the 50th anniversary of the historic marches from Selma to Montgomery, Ala. Some 15 feet in length and 24 inches deep — the largest, double-sided bench takes four people to move — they also offer a resting place, a still point in this brand new but already buzzy and busy building. Teague can’t wait for people to experience the design.
“I think more than anything, I just want to see it utilized, you know, like see asses in seats. That’s when it really comes alive.”
When Teague first started working with the center, he was part of a small group helping to figure out how this place could best serve people, especially its immediate neighbors on the South Side.
“It was a deep dive into community,” Teague recalls, “a great deal of chattery around the history, the artists and creative people, the labor, the jobs, the lack of jobs, thinking about young people, education.”
Teague thinks those conversations did have an influence on how the center came together, especially in amplifying its educational commitments. “It feels like a campus and most importantly, it’s connected to a library and a health and wellness center,” says Teague. “I don’t think I felt all of that on the front end.”
Teague also advocated for a local workforce, arguing, “If you build something on the South Side, you should actually have some South Siders working on building that.” That he himself became one of them, moving from consultant to designer, was an unexpected if fitting honor.
Eileen Rhodes, director of Blanc Gallery in Bronzeville, has collaborated with Teague for over a decade — one of the designer’s first solo outings was at her gallery. “Among the artists we’ve worked with, Norman is one of the most dedicated to a social practice of collaboration and opportunity sharing,” she says, adding, “His commitment to Chicago’s arts ecosystem is unmatched.”
“I am part and parcel of this city,” sums up Teague, 57. “I’ve tried to be the best I can as a neighbor, and yeah, I’m still blown away.”
Teague has spent almost his entire life in Chicago. He started out in Back of the Yards, and attended what was then Tilden Technical High School. Historic Sherman Park, another of Chicago’s Frederick Law Olmsted-designed parks, was his oasis.
“I played floor hockey, I swam at the pool, I fished in that lagoon like it was mine,” he recalls. “I would come home with buckets of fish.”
Teague’s mother moved them around a lot (“She didn’t understand that people had stopped migrating, so she just kept going!” he quips) and he kept up that pattern, living on the North Side for a spell, in neighborhoods like Lake View and teaching at Roberto Clemente High School in West Town.
At the same time Teague was carving out his own educational path, attending Harold Washington Community College where he studied architecture, then Columbia College Chicago for a B.A. in product design. The designer is also what he calls a “recipient of working at Crate & Barrel,” saying, “That was probably one of the more influential jobs into design and thinking about domesticity as it relates to products.”
At this point Teague, then in his late forties, married to Leslie Cain-Teague and father to sons Elijah and Noah, knew he needed more education to make a good living. So he went back to school, graduating with a master’s degree in designed objects from the School of the Art Institute in 2012. There he also started to solidify his own sense of place in the complicated history of design.
“I went through that school and learned to use this making as a way to tell stories that I didn’t see inside of the quote-unquote canon of design, stories of Black people.” he says. “My main purpose was to fill a void, to make a positive space within history.”
Even before finishing school, Teague’s designs met acclaim. In 2012 he worked with Theaster Gates on “12 Ballads for Huguenot House,” for the art exhibition dOCUMENTA 13 in Kassel, Germany. The Art Institute of Chicago almost immediately acquired a prototype of his Sinmi Stool, a bentwood rocking seat he made in school, inspired by both a classic American rocking chair and West African culture — Sinmi means “relax” in Yoruba.
For Teague, who is a tenure-track professor in Industrial Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the Obama benches represent a career high and a cumulation of everything he has poured into his life and work. Their beige, brown and black tones reflect “the shades of my neighborhood, my community.” The seat’s wood joints are based on West African Adinkra symbols and their angular shapes nod to the Center’s design, by architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. Of course, the spirit of the first Black presidential couple is there, too.
“I think a little bit of this has to do with the sexiness that comes from the couple that were…” Teague trails off and then starts to laugh. “Well, it’s never been a sexier presidential family!”
Alongside colleagues at his growing business, Norman Teague Design Studios, Teague is turning his attention elsewhere — working on affordable housing prototypes for the South Side and curating the 2027 Design Week in Lagos, Nigeria. He is also thinking about the long haul, including his project at the Obama Center.
“My hope is, 50 to 70 years, they’re calling me back to say, ‘Hey, we want to do a new set of benches,” and adds, “I hope my kids, my grandkids’ kids, will write about it. They should last as long as the museum lasts.”