Weems has also spent years grappling with what Obama represented in the broader American imagination. In Constructing History (2008), she incorporated footage from a 2006 debate between Obama and Hillary Clinton. In 2008, she commissioned artists across the country to document reactions to Obama’s historic candidacy and election. In 2012, Weems created another video work, The Obama Project, which examined both the hopes and the symbolic weight projected onto the nation’s first Black president.

So, when the Obama Foundation approached Weems about making a piece, the artist had no shortage of ideas.

Weems’s first proposals were more literal. One incorporated faces of those who worked alongside Obama throughout his career. Another idea focused on the president himself. “But I realized there will be thousands of images of Obama,” Weems recalls. “They didn’t need another one from me.” Eventually, she returned to Morris’s trumpets.

Like a democratic society, a jazz ensemble depends on balancing individual expression and collective responsibility. “There are all these individuals who are working together toward a common cause or theme,” says Weems. “And each one, at a certain point in the music, is allowed to play their solo and be heard within the context of the song.” No matter how far afield the music travels, she added, “you have to stay in step and return to the foundation in order for it all to work together seamlessly.”

It mattered, too, that jazz is rooted in a distinctly Black American tradition. “In the United States, we are the primary articulators of jazz and blues,” Weems says. The jazz trumpet, she felt, offered a unique way of thinking about Obama’s rise and the possibility of collective change.

The collage, created from both archival images and Weems’s own photographs, begins with soldiers from the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the famed Black Civil War unit, and moves through images of jazz musicians, instruments, and marchers, before culminating with young people dancing during the Civil Rights Movement. Between them, fragments of music history unfold across the wall. “There’s a rhythm to the photographs,” Weems says. “The way they work in juxtaposition to one another, what’s large, what’s small.” The work “has a certain kind of dynamic, a narrative that is actually played out on the wall.”

Weems also composed an original 40-minute piece with musicians Craig Harris and Vijay Iyer, among others, that accompanies the collage. Like the collage, the music, titled “The Obama Suite,” unfolds across several movements, with melodies passed between walking bass lines, haunting meditations, and emphatic improvisations. The result is a rich sonic tapestry that complements, and deepens, the visual piece.

“It’s beautiful and poetic,” says Bernard, reflecting on the work. “We often talk about democracy being a work in progress, and that progress is itself never linear.”

That idea is echoed throughout the campus, where many of the art commissions examine the unfinished project of America itself. In the Sky Room, for example, Sky of Hope by the artist Idris Khan transforms Obama’s 2015 Selma speech into a cascade of hand-stamped text. Outside, Alison Saar’s sculpture Torch Song reimagines the Statue of Liberty through the lens of blues music and Black womanhood. Jeffrey Gibson’s Yet With a Steady Beat combines Indigenous visual traditions with affirmations such as “I’ve Got the Power” and “I Am the Proud Child of an Immigrant.”

“Every artist really understood that this was a significant moment, and that we had stepped into history,” Weems says. Creating a work on such a scale, she added, meant asking a larger question: “Does the piece have the ability to speak to now and to the future of now?”

But whether the work succeeds, Weems adds, is not for her to decide. That is a question only time—and future audiences—can answer.