The Obama Presidential Center opened in Chicago on June 19. Former President and First Lady Barack and Michelle Obama were present at the opening ceremony to greet the center's first visitors.
Statues and portraits of the former presidential couple are not the only works of art that visitors can enjoy at the center. Over two dozen artists from across the globe were commissioned to contribute bespoke artworks for the facility.
Among them is visual artist Hugo McCloud, who hails from Palo Alto, California, but has since traveled the globe in pursuit of his artistic studies.
His piece for the Obama Presidential Center, titled “Hidden Reflection,” hangs in the center's private dining room. Through the unique mixed-media approach that combines oil paint with single-use plastics, it unites various places from Obama's life — Hawaiʻi, Chicago, Kenya and Indonesia — into a single landscape.
McCloud spoke with HPR about the meaning behind the work and what it meant to be able to contribute his art to the Obama Presidential Center.
Interview Highlights
On what inspired his artwork
HUGO McCLOUD: Simply put, I feel like individuals that rise to such a high level of notoriety or power or place in life, there's usually like a very quick once-over of where they came from and all the little things. And I think that for me personally, in my experience of growing, and what I do, sometimes it's the little things that are completely overlooked or not even talked about that are the most meaningful moments to that journey.
And so when I look at Barack Obama's kind of life and trajectory and place of origin and all the different places of origin, it made me think about how he must travel back in his mind to all these different specific, private moments that he may have had in these different places, and how much he could probably see that those little moments shaped him and made him into what he was, that nobody else will know. That's kind of like one of the things I mentioned outside of the apartment building that he lived in Hawaiʻi, like what was the corner store that he walked to, or what was the little market that he walked to, the lady that he spoke to every day, the snack that he would buy, and I think that those moments are the moments that we romanticize in life.
On using plastic bags as a medium
McCLOUD: What was really interesting about plastic bags is they're so fragile and so durable at the same time. And what was interesting about it is that I was in Brooklyn at the time, and I would see how the grocery stores would all use specific colors. So then if you saw that color in a different neighborhood, you knew that it came from a specific grocery store. … So, in my head, it was like, wow, imagine a 7-Eleven in Hawaiʻi, or a specific store in Hawaiʻi, and that bag can very easily get picked up, used, taken on a plane by a customer, and discarded in another country. And now it's being used in another country by somebody, right? Or discarded, or just left on the street. But then imagine somebody from Hawaiʻi being in that other country and just simply seeing that bag walking by. That is immediately going to flood their mind with all types of memories.
On building his artwork off a sense of place
McCLOUD: I looked at all the kind of spaces, places that are known or written about that he comes from — Indonesia, Kenya, Hawaiʻi, Chicago, obviously D.C. — and I took a bunch of mappings from all those different areas. And those became the underlayer grid that's in the painting. And it’s very subtle, but there are the lines of each one of those maps. So there's a map of the area of Kenya where he was originally from, there's the map of Hawaiʻi, there's a map of Chicago that all these are kind of wrapped into the story of the piece so ... all those maps are kind of the underlayer starting point of it. Then I kind of wanted to not suppress, but kind of like push that back into the background so that became very subtle, and I made it more about this idea of a simple horizon line in Hawaiʻi.
For more coverage of the Obama Presidential Center, click here.
This story aired on The Conversation on June 22, 2026. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Jinwook Lee adapted this story for the web.
