The Audacity of Art at the Obama Presidential Center

Yes, there will be the more predictable elements: a full-scale model of the Oval Office, videos of election nights and mannequins wearing the first lady’s dresses.

But the Obama Presidential Center, which officially opens on the South Side of Chicago in June, will also have a feature rarely — if ever — prominent in past presidential libraries: original works by 30 artists that were commissioned by Barack and Michelle Obama.

The decision to make art a priority in President Barack Obama’s privately funded, $850 million project for posterity is consistent with the Obamas’ longstanding commitment to the arts over two administrations. During those terms, the first couple centered artists like Alma Thomas, whose 1966 canvas “Resurrection” was the first painting by an African American woman to enter the White House Collection, along with Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald, who painted the Obamas’ National Portrait Gallery portraits.

Left, the museum’s crown contains words from President Barack Obama’s remarks on the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, Ala. Right, Julie Mehretu’s painted glass artwork, “Uprising of the Sun,” climbs the museum’s north facade.

A view out the windows of the museum, through the letters of a Presidential speech, looking out at the Center’s N.B.A.-size basketball court. — View from the Sky Room — which features Idris Khan’s artwork in the conical ceiling — looking across at the Obama Center’s N.B.A.-size basketball court.

“Michelle and I wanted the Obama Presidential Center to be more than a library or a museum,” Obama said in a statement to The New York Times. “We wanted it to be an important cultural institution for Chicago and the South Side, a place that belonged to the community. Art was central to that.”