LILY RESLINK
Staff Writer
Michael Strautmanis, currently the chief Corporate Affairs officer at the Obama Foundation, said his career in public life working alongside former President Barack Obama has shaped his understanding of the positive effect of creative, public spaces and religious pluralism on democracy.
At 2 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy, Strautmanis will deliver a lecture that draws from his experience in public-facing roles and calls for action for listeners to participate “in the glorious task of creating the world you want to see.”
“I want to really talk about this idea of pluralism as being fundamental to the goals of the Obama Foundation, and that within pluralism, it requires people to bring their ideas, their stories, into the public square,” Strautmanis said.
Strautmanis joined Obama’s office in the US Senate in 2005, worked for his 2008 presidential campaign and upon his election, joined his presidential transition team as chief counsel and the director of Public Liaison and Intergovernmental Affairs. Under several titles, he served as an advisor to Obama for around
two decades.
“In the earliest days of President Obama’s Senate career, I worked with him on a speech that he gave to Sojourners on the topic of religion and the public square,” Strautmanis said. In Strautmanis’ perspective, the speech was important because it articulated Obama’s beliefs as deeply informed by his faith.
Strautmanis said working on this speech with Obama influenced his own thinking about faith and tradition. He said Obama represented faith-rooted ideas that also supported the nation’s founding democratic ideals.
“[Obama’s] role in public life and the role we play in public life is we take those beliefs and then we bring them into a conversation; and we translate them into the language, almost the religious language, of our democracy.” Strautmanis said.
Strautmanis is a more recent addition to Week Five’s Interfaith Lecture Series on the theme of “The Creative Spirit: Art, Resilience and the Soulful Work of Making Art.”
He will bring his background as a lawyer and former Chief of Staff to the general counsel at the United States Agency for International Development, as well as his background leading My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, Obama’s initiative to create positive communities for boys and young men of color in the U.S.
According to the Obama Foundation, public art is something embodied in the priorities of Michelle and Barack Obama, and the newly opened Obama Presidential Center is bringing it to the South Side of Chicago.
Art, Strautmanis said, might be the purest expression of hope; he said it represents the human ability to create something and make the world anew. He said he will talk about why public art is an integral part of the Presidential Center, which has been 10 years in the making.
“[It] turns out that you can spend all the time in the world designing something… and it doesn’t come alive until people come show up and participate,” Strautmanis said. “It is really that act of participation, that dialogue that allows you to realize the mission of an institution.”
Stratmaunis said the path to creating a better world is inevitably messy and frustrating, but is born out of communal participation and creative expression.
“There’s disagreement and there’s conflict, but at the end of the day, what we have as a country is because others chose to participate,” Stratumanis said.
