Portraits test how we picture the Obama era

I tweeted my own idea for a title for the Barack portrait: “POTUS in a Garden?”

At least this art project doesn’t touch on the contentious world of sports, I thought — until the Chicago Tribune’s Phil Thompson reported this viral reaction among local baseball fans: Why is Obama’s portrait set in the vines of Wrigley Field.

That’s art in a working-class but also gentrifying town. Old-timers like me can remember a similar shock when Pablo Picasso’s untitled lion-like gift to Chicago was unveiled in 1967. One North Side alderman sniffed that it should have been replaced with a statue of Ernie Banks.

But the Picasso not only was slowly but surely embraced by Chicagoans; it also changed the way the city’s civic community related to public art — for the better. Diversity since has been not only tolerated but encouraged. Could that happen with post-Obama presidential art?

Context matters. The former president is not backgrounded by greenery as much as he is floating, superimposed over the leaves like a Photoshopped image. The face is clearly and accurately that of a serious, stone-faced and thoughtful Obama.

Obama’s hands at rest look accurate, too, but they look larger than normal. Maybe that’s supposed to be symbolic of a man with big work to do. Maybe that’s a cheeky cosmic joke, a subtle reference to our current president’s peculiar obsession with the notion that people think he has tiny hands.

The Obama portraits might best be viewed through the lens of a post-Obama future that is only beginning to come into focus. They remind me of what continues in my mind to be the most compelling Obama portrait: Shepard Fairey’s 2008 red, white and blue collage of the upturned face of the young Obama over the upper-case word “HOPE.”

As campaign art, its message was powerful enough to accelerate history. It put a brand on a candidate, a political movement and a social era. A decade later we can see how tough that act was to follow — for a president, for a painter and for a voting public. But some of us still have hope.