Artist Dorian Sylvain has worn many hats over the course of her career in Chicago. She began as a set designer, working predominantly with Black theater companies, before transitioning to decorative painting for private clients and then large-scale public art. At some point, as a South Shore mother, she met an up-and-coming state legislator with a funny name running for a seat in the U.S. Senate. “Our kids actually played soccer together for a while,” Sylvain says, then adds with a chuckle: “But I was never invited to the White House to paint Malia’s room. I don’t have any great stories like that.”
She does now. In January 2025, she and fellow Chicago native Sam Kirk, a multidisciplinary artist, were tapped to create a permanent installation for the Obama Presidential Center. After months of designing, drawing, and adjusting, Pass It Forward — their two-story mural of a basketball scene — will be unveiled June 19, when the center opens to the public.
The campus’s gardens and four buildings are loaded with installations from internationally lauded figures such as Maya Lin, Mark Bradford, and Carrie Mae Weems. Chicago is well represented, too, with art by Theaster Gates, Nick Cave, and the late sculptor Richard Hunt, whose final work, Book Bird, stands outside the library. The significance of joining this prestigious roster is not lost on Sylvain and Kirk: “It definitely feels like a moment of recognition,” Sylvain says.
“Once we started to realize that basketball would be anchoring the piece, we talked about how to integrate some South Side cultures into the work,” says Kirk.
The duo was recruited by Virginia Shore, the Obama Center’s curator of commissions. Prior to taking that job in 2019, she’d worked for 20 years for the U.S. State Department, acquiring art for embassies around the world. “I love looking at the work of artists I don’t know,” says Shore. To fill a giant wall inside Home Court, the center’s athletic facility with an NBA-size court, she proposed Kirk and Sylvain to Barack Obama. “The president responded to both,” says Shore. “So it felt like, OK, the way to solve this is to find a way to work together.”
Though the women hadn’t collaborated before, they were admirers of each other’s work. Their vibrant murals, often incorporating themes of cultural identity and representation, adorn buildings across the city: Sylvain’s on the Hyde Park Art Center and a Bronzeville grocery store; Kirk’s on community centers in Lake View and the Near West Side. In addition to their individual artistic styles, they brought different life experiences to the project: Hyde Park resident Sylvain, 65, raised three boys (now grown) as a single Black mom; Kirk, 44, a queer and biracial Little Village resident, is raising a toddler with her wife.
“Once we started to realize that basketball would be anchoring the piece, we talked about how to integrate some South Side cultures into the work,” says Kirk, who teaches a collaborative mural painting course at UIC. “We were really intentional about trying to include the diversity of Chicago, not only racially but generationally as well.”
The piece evolved through five concepts before the pair landed on the final one: four people shooting hoops, plus two smaller figures twirling jump ropes, playing double dutch. But the artists still had to navigate the complexity of the space: The mural is broken into two sections, separated by a bank of balcony seating — “a six-foot gap, if not more,” explains Kirk. “We had to play with perspective a little bit. It was cool to figure out how to achieve that.”
The title works on a couple of levels: It plays off the “Forward” slogan from Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, and it nods to the artists’ larger agenda. “Our mission is much broader than just trying to create a career for ourselves,” explains Sylvain. “How do we pass it forward to make sure we’re bringing along the next generations?”