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It is a tale of two presidents. On 14 June Donald Trump celebrated his 80th birthday by hosting a raucous crowd for Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) on the White House South Lawn. Four days later, on the eve of Juneteeth, Barack Obama will unveil a monument to his legacy that honours the audacity of art.

For the Obama Presidential Center on the South Side of Chicago, Barack and Michelle Obama commissioned original works by 30 artists from diverse backgrounds, a bold move never seen at such scale at a presidential library. It also forms a quiet rebuke of Obama’s successor, who has filled the Oval Office with stiff presidential portraits while plotting the demise of cultural stalwarts such as the Kennedy Center and Smithsonian Institution.

“They love art,” said Valerie Jarrett, chief executive of the Obama Foundation, reflecting on how the Obamas took a similarly inclusive approach to curating the White House. “We want people who come here to look at a piece of art, stand next to a stranger, have a conversation about that piece of art and how it touches them each in their own individual ways.”

The privately funded $850m presidential centre, opening nearly a decade after Obama left office, sits on a 19-acre campus in Chicago’s Jackson Park, close to where he lived as a young man and entered politics. It includes a new branch of the Chicago Public Library, an NBA-regulation basketball court, a recording studio and a sledding hill built because a young Michelle Obama never had one growing up on the city’s famously flat South Side.

The new artworks are dotted throughout. Jarrett insisted: “None of the art makes political statements.” But that depends on the definition of “political”. It does engage with the roots of African American history, the struggle for civil rights and the specific cultural legacy of Chicago.

Martin Puryear’s monumental sculpture Bending the Arc is inspired by Martin Luther King’s celebrated line, “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” and pays homage to John Lewis for carrying it forward. Puryear hand carved a straight, 34-ft-long wooden beam, which was then 3D scanned, enlarged and curved digitally, before reaching its final form in stainless steel in the John Lewis Plaza.

Richard Hunt’s Book Bird, located in the library reading garden, depicts a bird bursting from the pages of a book to evoke the emancipatory power of reading. Hunt was steeped in the civil rights movement and Chicago’s South Side. This was his final work before his death in 2023.

The Ann Dunham Water Terrace – named for the president’s mother – features a stone water feature by Maya Lin, titled Seeing Through the Universe, comprising an upright oculus that emits mist and a flat “pebble” that cascades with water.

Towering above it all is the museum, a 225-ft granite-covered monolith that has already been dubbed the Eye of Sauron, a Klingon prison and the “Obamalisk”. On the exterior, the Ethiopian-American artist Julie Mehretu has created Uprising of the Sun, a mesmerising 83-ft-tall painted glass window inspired by Obama’s remarks at the 50th anniversary of the marches from Selma to Montgomery.

In the Hope and Change Lobby, Nigerian-American artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby offers a mixed-media portrait of Barack and Michelle Obama – the first created of them together – that draws on archival imagery, family albums and historical ephemera. Nick Cave and Marie Watt join forces on a multimedia textile piece that brings together Indigenous and Black traditions through beaded nets and sculptural jingle elements.

Mark Bradford’s City of the Big Shoulders is a 38-ft-tall textured painting that envelops the three-storey west wall of the museum’s Our Story atrium, mapping Chicago and Lake Michigan with dazzling detail in a riot of colours and scrappy materials. On the white pyramid-shaped ceiling of the Nelson Mandela Sky Room, Idris Khan’s Sky of Hope overlaps thousands of hand-stamped words pulled from Obama’s speeches honouring civil rights leaders in a burst of textual colour.

Louise Bernard, the museum’s founding director, who also worked on the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, said the artists were given free range. “The artists were really thinking about the Obama legacy: a sense of hopefulness, a sense of connection to place, the power of place. The importance of Chicago specifically resonates in many of the works. A connection to Obama’s own personal story in terms of place and memory are definitely shaping the art experience.”

The feast of art contrasts with the star attractions at other presidential libraries: Richard Nixon’s boasts a replica of the White House east room, Ronald Reagan has a Boeing 707 that served as Air Force One and Bush has been known to display his own paintings. In another change, the Obama Presidential Center divorced itself from the National Archives and Records Administration, leaving millions of physical federal documents in a warehouse in Maryland and funding their digitisation instead.

But like its counterparts, the centre does contain a museum that seeks to narrate a presidency in positive but not propagandistic fashion (the Nixon library used to blame the Watergate scandal on Democrats but was revamped in 2011 to provide unvarnished truths). Obama’s picture is omnipresent and his voice booms out reciting “Yes, we can!” and other celebrated speeches that could be from a different planet to Trump’s “American carnage”.

Indeed, liberals feeling nostalgic for pre-Trump days – and willing to pay the $30 admission – are likely to find its beautifully curated collection both uplifting and heartbreaking, calling to mind an observation from Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys that there is “no period so remote as the recent past”.

The origin story of America’s first Black president is brought to life by some poignant objects: a woven wall hanging made by his mother when she was pregnant with him; his grandfather Hussein Obama’s colonial era passbook from 1940s Kenya; an essay about William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and King Lear that the student Obama wrote at Occidental College in Los Angeles (“In both plays, the tragic hero embarks on a quest for identity”).

Later, when he had moved to Chicago, there is a brown briefcase embossed with the name “Barack” in gold letters and an invitation to his 1992 wedding to Michelle Robinson. From his 2008 presidential campaign, what used to be ephemera is today’s historical artifact: flags, lanyards, posters, signs, 440 campaign buttons, a box of “Obama O’s” cereal and a 7-Eleven coffee cup with Obama’s name.

One display, titled The President’s Lucky Charms, reveals the tiny keepsakes, religious objects and tokens that supporters pressed into Obama’s hands on the campaign trail. He formed a daily ritual of carrying a selection of them in his pocket – not out of superstition, the exhibit notes, but as a “constant reminder of the remarkable stories of the people he met who would be counting on him to never forget them if he became president”.

For the 2009 inauguration, Marvel published an Amazing Spider-Man comic with his cartoon image. The Bible on which Obama swore the oath of office, previously used for Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration, is also on display, along with Nobel Peace Prize that he won soon after.

But the march of progress has a dark undertow. One caption notes how, in 1968, Republican Richard Nixon tapped into “stereotypes about Black people and the counterculture”. Another states: “The brighter Barack Obama’s candidacy became, the more it attracted racist and xenophobic hostility. False claims spread that he had been born in Kenya and educated in an Indonesian Islamic religious school … The general election brought even more instances of hateful language.”

At such moments the museum feel like an ominous foreshadowing of Trump’s rise – yet pointedly it never mentions him by name and, in a break from tradition, he has not been invited to Thursday’s grand opening ceremony. (More surprisingly Obama’s vice-president of eight years, Joe Biden, is also given short shrift in the display.)

Trump silently looms again on the third level, Working for the Common Good, which chronicles Obama’s eight years in power. One section is called Restoring American Leadership and cites the Paris climate agreement (shredded by Trump), Iran nuclear deal (shredded by Trump), restoring ties with Cuba (shredded by Trump) and decisive action against Ebola in west Africa (unlikely to be repeated now that USAid has been shredded by Trump).

There are triumphs too, such as rescuing the economy from near collapse after Wall Street’s reckless lending and overcoming unanimous Republican opposition to expand healthcare to millions, although the museum acknowledges, admirably, that the Affordable Care Act did not benefit everyone. The killing of 9/11 mastermind Osama Bin Laden is here, of course, but in an understated and sober display featuring a flag taken on the commando raid. A panel entitled “Improving the immigration system” now rings particularly hollow.

The fourth level, The People’s House, is the fun bit with exquisitely detailed dioramas of various White House rooms, an array of Michelle Obama’s dresses and a full-scale replica Oval Office (sans Trump gold) where visitors can sit at the Resolute desk – and open its drawer to see the letter that George W Bush wrote to his successor.

The physical and emotional climax is located on level eight. Free and open to the public without a museum ticket, the contemplative space offers sweeping, panoramic views of the South Side, the Chicago skyline and Lake Michigan. The windows are veiled by massive, 5-ft concrete letters from the text of Obama’s 2015 speech in Selma: “You are America. Unconstrained by habit and convention. Unencumbered by what is, ready to seize what ought to be.”

It is a noble sentiment that aims to soar above the rancour of today’s Washington. When, at last week’s presentation, a reporter raised the uncomfortable subject of Trump’s attacks on Obama’s legacy, and democracy itself, Jarrett noted that she now runs a charitable organisation: “I don’t discuss politics anymore. We believe that this campus will be timeless. What will be the constant is the values that drove President Obama to run for office and serve for all the years and the work that we do now is really preparing the next generation.”

One item is conspicuously absent from the collection: the tan suit that Obama wore to a press conference in 2014, a supposed controversy that earned its own Wikipedia entry in those simpler times. “The reason we don’t have the tan suit is President Obama gave it away when he was cleaning out his closet,” Jarrett said wryly. “We thought about a replica but that would not be authentic.”