Unseated: Where will Barack Obama's chairs from the Illinois Senate go?

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — The Obama Presidential Center in Chicago plans to proudly include artifacts from throughout the former president’s life and early career in the city, exploring the role his adopted home played in shaping his rise to the White House.

But officials are saying thanks, but no thanks, to evidence of his earliest electoral triumph, turning down a chance to display two chairs he sat in on the floor of the Illinois Senate while serving in Springfield.

The stately leather chairs have largely sat in storage for two decades, awaiting the chance to remind people about the nearly eight years the young South Side community organizer, lawyer and University of Chicago law professor worked on ethics legislation, bills aimed at curbing racial profiling and other matters as part of the Democratic majority in the state Senate.

But those aspirations are being dashed at the moment as officials at the Obama Presidential Center, now just months from opening in Chicago, say they aren’t interested in adding the duo to their collection. The center currently has “no plans to include the chairs in our exhibit,” Obama Foundation spokesperson Erin Elzo said recently.

The result: Illinois remains the proud owner of two historically verified, Obama-era chairs with nowhere obvious to go.

The first chair is a particularly distinguished executive-style seat, upholstered in maroon and stamped with the Illinois state seal. It was Obama’s state Senate floor seat from 1997 to 2001. Following a renovation project kicked off in part by falling plaster from the Senate chamber’s ceiling, Obama’s and the other senators’ red seats were swapped for simpler brown ones.

After Obama left Springfield — having first been elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004 and elected president in 2008 — the brown chair was moved to storage, according to Illinois Secretary of the Senate Tim Anderson, who oversees Illinois Senate records. He added that since all chamber chairs are tagged underneath the cushion, they can be sure it cushioned Obama’s posterior.

Under state law, these chairs would have eventually been auctioned off or destroyed had Illinois lawmakers not had the foresight to pass a 2014 law allowing the secretary of the senate to donate objects used by Obama to museums or the presidential museum.

“Basically, I think it would be a good idea for us to donate the furniture we have from former Sen. Obama to the presidential library rather than sell his seat. Someone tried that, and it didn’t work out so well for him,” the bill’s sponsor, then-Democratic Senate President John Cullerton, said at the time, invoking former Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s infamous attempt to sell Obama’s vacated U.S. Senate seat.

Anderson said the Senate saved the chairs and other Obama-era items specifically in the hope that the Obama center in Chicago would want them. The center, located in Jackson Park on the South Side, will include a Chicago Public Library branch, an auditorium, a media suite, an athletic center and the museum with exhibits from Obama’s past.

On its website, the Obama center details an “artifact wish list” of materials it is seeking to acquire for consideration and potential display, including “materials related to the President’s career as a community organizer,” “documents related to the President and First Lady’s early legal careers, including their time together at the Sidley Austin law firm” in Chicago and “materials related to the President’s time as a professor at the University of Chicago, including syllabi, assignments, graded papers, etc.”

The site even notes the center is seeking “campaign memorabilia and other material related to Barack Obama’s career as a state and U.S. Senator.”

But, at least for now, that doesn’t include the two chairs.

With the chairs officially ghosted, Illinois Senate President Don Harmon’s spokesperson, John Patterson, said the state has to figure out what comes next.

That’s more than can be said for some of Obama’s former furniture, which didn’t survive long enough to face rejection.

The desk Obama used alongside his chambers chairs met a gruesome end when it, along with other desks in the Senate, was destroyed after remodeling in late 2006. According to a 2008 Galesburg Register-Mail article, the desks were not worth saving because they functioned more like long workbenches used by several senators than a desk, and were not made of high-quality wood.

If the chairs are ultimately declared surplus, they could follow the usual state property path: first offered to other agencies, then to local governments and certain nonprofits, and finally auctioned to the public on the state’s iBid website. In other words, your living room could one day host a piece of legislative history.

The chairs haven’t spent all these years in isolation.

Obama’s red Senate chair was displayed at the Illinois State Museum in Springfield as part of the “Presidential Illinois” exhibit in 2024 and early 2025. The exhibit celebrated four men who lived in Illinois for substantial periods in their lives — Obama, Ronald Reagan, Ulysses S. Grant and Abraham Lincoln — and reached the White House.

Outside of Obama’s red chamber chair, the exhibit also displayed two tan chairs and a desk Obama used in his Illinois Senate office. Since the exhibit’s conclusion, the Illinois State Museum has stored those objects while the Illinois Capitol building has undergone construction that continues.

The museum is also storing the brown chair as well as a love seat, couch, small table, red office chair, credenza, three laptops, tan leather caucus chair and a box of files from Obama on behalf of the Senate for the time being, according to a loan agreement between Anderson and the museum.

Patterson, who covered Obama as a state government reporter back in the day, said even without the chairs, the Obama Presidential Center will still be worth visiting.

“We’re all confident the Obama Presidential Library will be a tremendous experience regardless,” Patterson said.