Aliza Nisenbaum's mural
Reading Circles / Weaving Dreams / Seeding Futures is now on view at the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, where it was commissioned to preside over the Library's reading room.
Spanning the full breadth of the room, the monumental painting depicts moments of civic life within a public library. Structured around weaving as a form of storytelling, the twelve panels move from day to night, from private study to public participation. Textile motifs drawn from Otomi embroideries and Kenyan Kanga textiles carry this logic across the surface, threading together the composition's distinct spaces and figures. At the painting's center, a reading circle gathers around writers figured as custodians of knowledge, among them Toni Morrison, Walt Whitman, James Baldwin, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Maxine Hong Kingston. Windows in the library open onto Chicago's own history and visual culture, with allusions to Georgia O'Keeffe, Roger Brown, and Joseph Yoakum, and a pre-Columbian storyteller figure drawn from the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Reading Circles / Weaving Dreams / Seeding Futures is on view in the Chicago Public Library branch at the Obama Presidential Center, located at
6021 S. Stony Island Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637. The library is free and open to the public.
