Nick Cave & Marie Watt Create An Installation For The Obama Presidential Center

This month, Marie Watt and Nick Cave‘s large-scale collaborative installation will be revealed at the opening of the Obama Presidential Center, a 19.3-acre campus in Chicago, Illinois. The work is 45 feet tall and co-constituted by Watt’s signature tobacco tin jingles and beaded nets fabricated from pony beads and smaller white beads. The artists’ materials reference their Indigenous and Black material cultures and legacy of style and adornment. The jingles originate from the Anishinaabe jingle dress tradition and are worn today during powwows and some ceremonies. The beaded nets gesture to the use of beads in Black and African hairstyles—what Cave has called an “urbanness” that connects to ritual and ceremonial dress across cultures.

Titled This Land, Shared Sky, the installation occupies a tilted concrete wall adjacent to a floor-to-ceiling window in a building designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects. Shifting natural light animates the materials throughout the day, changing the temperature of the work. Cave’s beaded nets form a foundational layer suggesting topography, migration, and movement across landscape; Watt’s jingles sit atop and interweave with his, producing a visual call and response.

The design reflects the center’s mission as a community hub rather than a traditional presidential library. The raw concrete architecture demanded materials that could bring warmth and texture to an industrial surface. Cave and Watt responded with what Cave describes as “levels of adornment and embellishment”—thousands of small, visceral elements that reward close looking. The title evokes borders and their permeability: land and sky meet at the horizon, and light, as Watt observes, “moves through borders quite freely.”

The artists collaborated virtually and met on-site for the first time during installation, raising the work six feet to improve its relationship to the architecture.