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LatinXAmerican is an intergenerational group exhibition featuring nearly 40 Latinx artists from Chicago and beyond. The exhibition assesses the presence and absence of Latinx artists in DePaul Art Museum’s collection, and reflects efforts to build in this area as part of a multi-year initiative to increase the visibility of Latinx artists and voices in museums, working towards equity and lasting transformation. Occupying all of the museum’s galleries, LatinXAmerican includes photographs, paintings, works on paper, sculptures, textiles, videos, and installations primarily drawn from DPAM’s collection, including several recent acquisitions, as well as new works from artists living throughout the United States and Puerto Rico.
LatinXAmerican es una exposición grupal que se expande por varias generaciones e incluye a casi 40 artistas latinxs de Chicago y otras regiones. Esta exposición evalúa la presencia y la ausencia de lxs artistas latinxs en la colección del DePaul Art Museum, y refleja los esfuerzos de mejorarla como parte de una iniciativa de varios años que tiene por fin incrementar la visibilidades de lxs artistas y las voces latinxs en los museos, con el fin de acercarse a la equidad y a una transformación verdadera. LatinXAmerican ocupa todas las galerías de nuestro museo e incluye fotografías, pinturas, obras en papel, esculturas, textiles, videos e instalaciones tomados principalmente de la colección del dpam, esto incluye varias adquisiciones recientes, así como obras nuevas de artistas que viven en diversas partes de Estados Unidos y Puerto Rico.
This museum-wide exhibition explores the shifting—and at times contradictory—social, cultural, political, and artistic identities between Latinx artists of different circumstances and generations. The term Latinx is used here as a nonbinary, gender-inclusive alternative to Latino or Latina for people of Latin American heritage living primarily in the United States. Not every artist in the exhibition identifies as a Latinx artist, some prefer national, racial, and/or ethnic designations of identity, therefore we encourage you to explore the artists’ diverse backgrounds.
Explore LatinXAmerican in 3D
Caroline Kent rediscovers and redefines language and abstraction in painting. Though the forms in her paintings resemble familiar shapes, together they create an abstract dimension where symbols, movements, and marks exist together with various meanings. This negation and redefinition of language took rook for the artist while living in and deciphering the foreign dialects of Romania.
The Myth of Shadows borrows its lines and angles directly from a Mexican mathematical textbook. Devoid of its graphs though, these marks both lack direct meaning while simultaneously transforming themselves into new signifiers. When comparing the gestures in the drawings Future Moments Need Future Movements to those in The Myth of Shadows, there are similarities in the shapes' compositions. Avoiding direct translation, however, Kent lightly tapes performative cues into place near each symbol, suggesting an impermanence–the potential for rearrangement and, therefore, a redefinition of the form.
Kent's interest in the function of subtitles, or the lack thereof, in foreign films drives much of her abstract work. Kent grapples with the question of how an image or a form can, in turn, produce a sound, a word, and, eventually, a language. Kent regularly writes descriptions or phrases in language conjured from a scene, a smell, or a remembered taste.
In the works on paper, Kent applies black and white paint with one pastel hue, generally a violet pink or beige yellow, with no particular shape, start, or ending point in mind. Once she creates the image, she randomly assigns her phrases, imaginary scenes, or poetic compositions, to each image to create exploratory affiliations between the text and abstract images. The phrases or subtitles operate in investigative ways, exploring the process of how one relates words to image or language to form.
I saw a man who looked like you, 2015Acrylic and typewriter on paper10 x 8 in.Courtesy of the artist/Kohn Gallery and PATRON Gallery, Chicago
She had a wicked tongue, 2019Acrylic and typewriter on paper8 ½ x 7 in.Courtesy of the artist/Kohn Gallery and PATRON Gallery, Chicago
Her face was a disguise, 2015Acrylic and typewriter on paper10 x 8 in.Courtesy of the artist/Kohn Gallery and PATRON Gallery, Chicago
I would hear the most unsettling music, 2019Acrylic and typewriter on paper8 ⅕ x 7 in.Courtesy of the artist/Kohn Gallery and PATRON Gallery, Chicago
The Myth of Shadows, 2019-20Acrylic on unstretched canvas114 x 72 in.Courtesy of the artist/Kohn Gallery and PATRON Gallery, Chicago
Future Moments Need Future Movements, pt. 1, 2019Graphite and masking tape on paper22 x 30 in.Courtesy of the artist/Kohn Gallery and PATRON Gallery, Chicago
Future Moments Need Future Movements, pt. 2, 2019Graphite and masking tape on paper22 x 30 in.Courtesy of the artist/Kohn Gallery and PATRON Gallery, Chicago
In 2010, Dianna Frid began an archive of obituaries from the New York Times to produce Words from Obituaries, an ongoing series of embroidered words chosen from particular obituaries with the artist’s chosen color-coded shades corresponding to the profession or vocation of the deceased person. The two works exhibited here correspond to the obituaries of two Cuban-born men—one an anti-Fidel Castro political dissident and head of a terrorist organization, and the other a close ally of Castro.
Frid explains: “As I sort through hundreds of obituaries I find, in a few of them, samplings of phrases that are just right. They seize a moment in language that operates both within and outside the source. I do not choose these words for their narrative or honorific value, but rather for an urgency that is external, yet related, to those values.”
NYT, NOV 30, 2017, ARMANDO HART, 2018 Canvas, paper, embroidery floss, graphiteCourtesy of the artist and Alan Koppel Gallery
NYT, MAY 24, 2018, LUIS POSADA CARRILES, 2020Canvas, paper, embroidery floss, graphite15 x 20 in.Courtesy of the artist and Alan Koppel GalleryPhoto: Tom Van Eynde
In the colonial period, the whistled version of the Zapotec languages became a tool of resistance to Spanish authority. Existing as an exclusively oral language until recently, Zapotec is today an endangered language under the social and political stratification of indigenous groups in Mexico. Since 2010, this group of Indigenous dialects spoken in Oaxaca, in southwestern Mexico, have been a stimulating field of research for artist Gala Porras-Kim. Whistling and Language Transfiguration is a vinyl recording which translates Zapotec spoken words into their accompanying whistles, while Notes after G.M. Cowan is a series of three drawings depicting these whistling postures. Porras-Kim's works are both aesthetic and utilitarian––capable of serving as a means for an outsider to access information about an unfamiliar culture––and exist as alternative resources to transmit and archive the Zapotec languages in the present day.
Whistling and Language Transfiguration, 2012Vinyl LP record, unique cyanotype print 12 x 12 in.Courtesy of the artist, Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles Photo: Jean-Baptiste Beranger
Notes after G.M. Cowan 2, 10, and 6, 2012Graphite on paper, Post-it, woodDimensions variableCourtesy of the artist, Commonwealth and Council, Los AngelesPhoto: Jean-Baptiste Beranger
The words painted in Candida Alvarez’s Son So & So refer to the artist’s son, who was ten years old at the time. On the other hand, “son” also refers to Son Cubano, a style of music and dance that originated in Cuba at the beginning of the 20th century embodying a popular mix of African rhythms made with conga drums, trumpets, and maracas, which Alvarez listened to growing up in Puerto Rico. Alvarez explains that although the title does not define the painting, it rather refers to pictorial and linguistic pathways that come to mind in the studio setting. She discloses that “the act of ‘listening’ in the studio is an action which allows me to concoct strategies or systems of working using personal details.”
Son So & So, 2001 Acrylic, pencil, flashe on woodCollection of DePaul Art Museum, gift of Chuck Thurow2016.14
Yvette Mayorga uses cake-decorating tools to apply acrylic paint, evoking frosting, sugar, and celebration. Yet beneath the seemingly saccharine indulgence of the colorfully-piped surfaces of her canvases are cleverly concealed and complex stories of immigration, labor, and identity. A Vase of the Century 1 (After Century Vase c. 1876) is based on a ceramic urn by Union Porcelain Works that commemorated the first one hundred years of the United States. Mayorga reflected on this work as a means of engaging with histories of colonialism by replacing traditional imagery with her own iconography. For example, Mayorga’s pink cars allude to her father hiding in a vehicle to cross the US/Mexico border in the 1970s, as well as childhood notions of femininity, such as pink Barbie cars. The central figure in a baseball cap stands for all immigrants, who are also depicted in four framed scenes recalling news footage of the US/Mexico border wall and women fleeing Border Patrol.
A Vase of the Century 1 (After Century Vase c. 1876), 2019Acrylic on canvas24 x 18 inCollection of DePaul Art Museum, Art Acquisition Endowment Fund2020.1
Known for his work with unconventional materials, Vik Muniz uses torn bits of paper from popular magazines and tabloids, refashioning them to mimic iconic images from art history. The Lemon, after Manet recreates Edouard Manet’s 1880 still life, Le citron (The Lemon). Muniz says, “When people look at my images, I don’t want them to see the things that are represented. I prefer that they see how one thing can represent another.” Muniz’s work stands in a complex relation to the so-called original: Muniz radicalizes the still life tradition by not only depicting quotidian objects, but also using these very objects as the material itself. Blurring the hierarchy between popular forms of media and works of fine art, Muniz continues the legacy of the classical avant-garde that sought to challenge the boundaries between art and life in an effort to integrate the two.
The Lemon, after Manet, 2011Digital C-print71 x 115 ¼ in.Collection of DePaul Art Museum, gift of Eric Ceputis and David W. Williams2017.37
“Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater” is a colloquial expression that points to avoidable error in which something good is eliminated when trying to get rid of something bad. In Ramón Miranda Beltrán’s work, the expression “don't throw the baby out with the bathwater” takes on another turn. The baby and the bath water is a projection and website that moves cyclically through eight photographs of sculptures made from 2016 to 2020 and with which the artist explores materiality and form, as well as ideas of representation and non-representation in politics and art. These slides are followed by six images of the artist‘s studio as well as underground karst caves in Puerto Rico that have informed Miranda Beltrán’s thinking in relation to aesthetics beyond the modern. The cycle ends and begins with three collages of works by Jacob Lawrence, Jacques-Louis David, Benjamin West, and Charles Édouard Armand-Dumaresq which depict a time related to the creation of the nation state.
Miranda Beltrán explains that currently, nation states are in an ethical crossroads where either “we reform our societies to ensure people of color will be bonafide citizens in order to replenish confidence in its institutions or a rupture and departure will happen.” He continues to say that “we are in a place where the considerations are precisely that, either the baby (modernity) drowns in its filth (the bath water) and we have to throw away both or the baby is still alive and we have to make sure we trashed the dirty water.”
The baby and the bathwater, 2020Digital slide showDimension variableCourtesy of the artist and Sociedad del Tiempo Libre
The baby and the bathwater, 2020Digital slide showDimension variableCourtesy of the artist and Sociedad del Tiempo Libre
“Everything that I make feels like a doodle that went out of control or a small painting that just got enlarged,” explains José Lerma. “To me that influences your sense of scale in relation to the work.” Lerma’s wallpaper and four paintings are a response to works in the European and American collection at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC). The drawings seen on the wallpaper were made on bar napkins––reminiscent of old masters creating "drunk drawings at bars"––and produced by Lerma over eight months of interacting with AIC’s collection. The top of the wallpaper is a representation of all paintings on display on the AIC’s west wall of the European collection. The bottom of the wallpaper reflects the few works by Latinx artists—there are only eight—currently on display in the AIC’s American collection.
In light of the often invisible economic and artistic contributions of immigrants in this country, and through the use of common construction materials such as prefabricated doors and household paint, Lerma invites us to reconsider the definition of “American artist” within our museum collections.
La Madrileñita, 2020Acrylic, construction grade silicone, burlap, on standard door80 x 28 in.All works are courtesy of the artist and Kavi Gupta, Chicago
Pendant portrait of Antonio de Ulloa y de la Torre-Guiral (1670), 2020Acrylic, construction grade silicone, burlap, on standard door80 x 36 in.Courtesy of the artist and Kavi Gupta, Chicago
Portrait of a woman and her son, 2020Acrylic, construction grade silicone, burlap, on standard door80 x 36 in.Courtesy of the artist and Kavi Gupta, Chicago
Portrait of a Lady, Peru (1700), 2020Acrylic, construction grade silicone, burlap, on standard door80 x 36 in.Courtesy of the artist and Kavi Gupta, Chicago
Clad in a camouflage suit of dry grasses from the Marin Headlands in Northern California, Maria Gaspar, as part of a site-specific performance series, disappears—in plain sight—into a landscape with unique histories and inhabitants that are often forgotten or made invisible. Known for its views of the Golden Gate Bridge, Marin Headlands, is a nature conservatory and home to endangered wildlife. Previously, the area was the site of military fortifications during the world wars, ranching and farming lands for Mexican, Spanish, and Portuguese immigrants, and was originally the home of the Coastal Miwok tribe, which struggled to maintain its existence in the face of colonialism and conquest. Gaspar highlights the way in which even seemingly untouched, rural space is structured according to historical, political, and social forces that determine what is visible and invisible.
Disappearance Suit (Marin Headlands, CA), 2018Digital inkjet print on Hahnemuhle paper36 x 24 in.Collection of DePaul Art Museum, Acquisition Endowment Fund2020.5Photo: Nicolas Mastracchio
America’s Wall (El muro de America) was inspired by the persistent questioning that Tanya Aguiñiga received during her travels between the US and Mexico regarding the existence of a wall on the countries’ borders. Aguiñiga grew up on both sides of the San Diego/Tijuana border, crossing between Mexico and the United States daily for 14 years. Aguiñiga’s work documents and extracts evidence of the wall’s existence—there are three consecutive walls in the part of Mexico where Aguiñiga grew up —all in front of Trump’s proposed wall prototypes. The particular section of the border fence found in this work is made up of corrugated jet-landing mats recycled from Operation Desert Storm during the Gulf War. This wall segment was erected during Operation Gatekeeper in 1994, a strategic reinforcement tactic on the US/Mexico Border, which was responsible for more migrant deaths in its first year than in the entirety of the previous 75 years of Border Patrol history. Aguiñiga and her team from the bi-national project AMBOS (“both” in Spanish, or an acronym for “art made between opposite sides” in English) took rust impressions on cotton from these walls, as evidence of their existence.
America's Wall (El muro de America), 2018Performance photoPerformed by Tanya Aguiñiga, Jackie Amézquita, Cecilia Brawley, Natalie Godinez, Izabella Sanchez, and Shannen WallaceCourtesy of the artist and AMBOS ProjectPhoto: Gina Clyne
America's Wall (El muro de America), 2018Performance photoPerformed by Tanya Aguiñiga, Jackie Amézquita, Cecilia Brawley, Natalie Godinez, Izabella Sanchez, and Shannen WallaceCourtesy of the artist and AMBOS ProjectPhoto: Gina Clyne
America's Wall (El muro de America), 2018Performance photoPerformed by Tanya Aguiñiga, Jackie Amézquita, Cecilia Brawley, Natalie Godinez, Izabella Sanchez, and Shannen WallaceCourtesy of the artist and AMBOS ProjectPhoto: Gina Clyne
The daughter of Mexican and Yaqui farm workers, Ester Hernandez creates symbols of her Chicana identity while highlighting the political and social injustices inflicted on Latinx populations in the United States. In Sun Raid, Hernandez transforms a familiar raisin box to make a statement about the situation many farm workers face in the United States. The wholesome face normally found on the front of the box is changed into a skeletal farm worker wearing a huipil, a native Mexican dress. The figure also wears a security-monitoring bracelet labeled ICE (Immigrations and Customs Agents), signifying looming deportation. Hernandez writes the names of Mexican indigenous groups from the Oaxaca area because they make up a large number of farm workers in the United States. The artist's concern for farm workers can be traced back to her well-known 1982 print titled Sun Mad in which she transformed the same raisin box into a statement about the overuse of pesticides and its effect on our bodies and the environment.
Sun Raid, 2008Color screenprint28 ½ x 22 ⅛ in.Collection of DePaul Art Museum, Art Acquisition Endowment Fund2009.158
Alberto Aguilar grew up in Cicero, Illinois where his parents owned the first small Mexican grocery store, in a predominantly working class Italian and Lithuanian suburb of Chicago. The store was eventually put out of business by a larger supermarket called El Torito which opened up down the street. Aguilar takes on his early experiences of gentrification for his series of works Propaganda Familiar: signs composed of English/Spanish cognates, or words that look similar in both languages, in the classic style of hand-painted signs often associated with Mexican groceries in Chicago. The interplay between languages highlights a neighborhood in transition and of multiple heritages represented there. On view are three new versions of the six signs that were originally shown on the grocery store windows of a Mexican grocery store in a gentrifying St. Louis neighborhood.
Propaganda Familiar 2, 2015Enamel on butcher paper36 x 58 in.Courtesy of the artist
Propaganda Familiar 4, 2015Enamel on butcher paper36 x 58 in.Courtesy of the artist
Propaganda Familiar 5, 2015Enamel on butcher paper36 x 58 in.Courtesy of the artist
Las Nietas de Nonó is a collaborative duo of sisters Mulowayi and Mapenzi Nonó who live in Carolina, Puerto Rico, in a rural and industrial working-class neighborhood. Interpretaciones de la Sal is a visual exploration in the salt flats of Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico. In that region, the Arawak indigeneous people began extracting salts from the salt flats in AD 700 and in the 16th century, the Spanish took over salt extraction using the local Arawak people for slave labor. Today, Cabo Rojo is still used for commercial salt extraction by a private operator, though the property is owned and operated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Las Nietas de Nonó’s Interpretaciones de la Sal points to the physical labor involved in slavery and colonization.
Interpretaciones de la Sal, 2016-2020Digital videoDimensions variableCourtesy of the artist
Alejandro Jiménez-Flores embeds flower petals, dirt and other materials into plaster in a poetic attempt to fix the inevitable life and death processes of blooming, fading, and decay. With allusions to existential questioning and queer desire, flowers appear throughout Jiménez-Flores’ work by way of process that allows their own form of expression by releasing its dyes onto the plaster surface. Jiménez-Flores recalls playing with their cousin as a child, collecting dried petals and leaves from geraniums and placing them into a bucket with water and dirt stirring this concoction with a stick, playing witchcraft (haciendo brujeria) As a child Jiménez-Flores was already learning from the language flowers use to communicate: through pigments, shapes, color, and the effects of light on flowers' materiality.
The titles of the works are taken from Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H., Jacques Derrida’s Apprendre à vivre enfin (Learning to Live Finally) and the beginning of his Spectres de Marx (Specters of Marx), respectively. According to the artist they evoke “forgiving and learning, a constant becoming.”
“learning to live finally…”, 2018 Geranium petals, dirt, and plasterAll works are courtesy of the artist
“Forgiveness is an attribute of living matter”, 2018 Geranium petals, dirt, and plasterAll works are courtesy of the artist
tú lip · s, 2019 Gifted and collected flower petals, soft pastels, and plasterAll works are courtesy of the artist
buds —cruising, 2019Gifted and collected flower petals, soft pastels, and plasterAll works are courtesy of the artist
tús labios —deseo, 2019 Flower petal dyes, soft pastels, plaster, and pins on muslinAll works are courtesy of the artist
A first-generation American artist born in Chicago to Colombian and Mexican parents, Harold Mendez creates sculptures and installations that investigate the intersection of identity with historical narratives and cycles. Borrowing its title from a poem by Juan Felipe and truth, visibility and absence, with an interest in how constructions of history and geography shape our sense of self. A crumpled, copper copy of a pre-Columbian death mask from the Museo del Oro in Bogotá, Colombia, is set upon a slab of travertine marble, a material often distilled water, in which visitors may see their own face travertine, evoking rituals of birth and death. Meaning “heavenly flower" in Greek, carnations symbolize love and innocence and are said to have sprung up from the Virgin Mary's tears upon witnessing Jesus' crucifixion.
Let us gather in a flourishing way, 2016Travertine, oxidized copper reproduction of a pre-Columbian death mask from the Museo del Oro (Bogota, Colombia), water, carnationsDimensions variableCollection of DePaul Art Museum, Art Acquisition Endowment Fund2017.8Photo: Aron Grant
Let us gather in a flourishing way, 2016Travertine, oxidized copper reproduction of a pre-Columbian death mask from the Museo del Oro (Bogota, Colombia), water, carnationsDimensions variableCollection of DePaul Art Museum, Art Acquisition Endowment Fund2017.8Photo: Aron Grant
In Breath Drawings, Susy Bielak uses her breath to create drawings of ventifacts, or rocks shaped by the wind. The composition of the drawings was inspired by the Mayan huipil, garments embroidered with references to the natural and supernatural worlds. In their woven patterns, the garments can relay narratives of birth, death, and regeneration. Bielak began this series of works in 2013, but in 2020, in light of the pandemic, Bielak returned to them, now with associations that have evolved. “They are about breathing life into stone and memorializing the dead. I think of these works as acts of memorialization, mantles of light, and shield,” explains Bielak. In Jewish tradition, placing a stone atop a gravesite symbolizes the concretization of the legacy of the deceased in the heart and mind of the survivor. Her daily ritual of beachcombing the shore of Lake Michigan for basalt, granite, and slag supplies her models for weekly drawings.
Breath Drawings, 2020Mixed media on paper (Arches hotpress watercolor)22 ½ x 30 in.Courtesy of the artist
Breath Drawings, 2020Mixed media on paper (Arches hotpress watercolor)22 ½ x 30 in.Courtesy of the artist
Mexican-born artist and educator Diana Solís has lived in Chicago for the past 40 years where she pursued a career in photojournalism for various local newspapers and publications. The photographs in this series document Solís and her friends, as well as scenes from Pride parades and Gay and Lesbian rallies from 1970s to the 1990s. As a young Mexicana/Chicana photographer during this period, Solís’ life and work were very interconnected with the social and political struggles of the LGBTQ+ and women’s communities in Chicago. Solís has worked on a range of media including comics, illustration, painting, drawing, printmaking, and site-specific murals and installations, but only recently has she come back to photography with a series of works related to COVID in the neighborhood of Pilsen, Chicago.
Gay, friends and Allies March. Stop Harassment of Gays, Dearborn Street, Chicago, June 1979Archival Piezography PrintAll works are courtesy of the artist
Gay, Friends and Allies March. Stop Harassment of Gays, Chicago, June 1979Archival Piezography PrintAll works are courtesy of the artist
Friends, Gay and Lesbian Pride Rally, Diversey Parkway, Lincoln Park, Chicago, June 1980Archival Piezography Print All works are courtesy of the artist
Mother and Son, 11th Annual Gay and Lesbian Pride Parade Chicago, June 1980Archival Piezography PrintAll works are courtesy of the artist
Crowd, Gay and Lesbian Pride Rally, Diversey Parkway, Lincoln Park, Chicago, June 1980Archival Piezography PrintAll works are courtesy of the artist
Pride, Gay and Lesbian Pride Parade, Chicago, June 1980Archival Color Inkjet PrintAll works are courtesy of the artist
Self-Portrait, Greenview Street Apartment, Chicago, 1980Archival Piezography PrintAll works are courtesy of the artist
“Gay P.T.A.”, Gay and Lesbian Pride Rally, Lincoln Park, Chicago, June 1980Archival Piezography PrintAll works are courtesy of the artist
On Broadway, Gay and Lesbian Pride Parade, Chicago, June 1980Archival Piezography PrintAll works are courtesy of the artist
Lisa and Tawne. Lakeview, Chicago, 1982Archival Piezography PrintAll works are courtesy of the artist
Pride Float, Gay and Lesbian Pride Parade, Chicago, June 1981Archival Piezograph PrintAll works are courtesy of the artist
Couple. Pride Rally, Chicago, June 1980Archival Piezography PrintAll works are courtesy of the artist
Marsha, Tawne, Lisa and Lou, Lakeview, Chicago, March 1982Archival Piezography PrintAll works are courtesy of the artist
Gay and Lesbian Pride Parade, Chicago, June 1991Archival Color Inkjet PrintAll works are courtesy of the artist
Nicole Marroquin’s Uprising at Harrison High School 1968 points to the fall of 1968, when Harrison High School student leaders, Victor Adams and Sharron Matthews, organized classmates across ethnic lines throughout the city, in the fight for justice. Latinx students walked out of class in solidarity with their Black classmates who began holding weekly walkouts that September. “It is important to note,” Marroquin says, “that at this time CPS categorized Latinx students as white.” The photograph in the print depicts city police attacking student coalition groups who were having a meeting in the school’s lunchroom. Marroquin explains that “the Red Squad (the secret arm of the Subversive Unit of the Chicago Police Department) tracked and harassed student organizers, while Harrison's Principal Burke threatened to deport Latinx student organizers.”
The poster Por Mi Raza is a tribute to Mexican born Lola Navarro (1935–2004) who was a community organizer, activist, and mother of eight. She fought for housing, economic justice, and against police brutality in the South of Chicago, and later in Pilsen and Little Village. Marroquin’s Untitled poster from 2018 depicts the mastheads of Chicago Latinx bilingual Spanish-English newspapers from 1927–1985 that served or reported on Latinx communities of Chicago, and are now out of print and unarchived.
Untitled, 2018Silkscreen print24 x 36 in.Collection of DePaul Art Museum, Art Acquisition Endowment2020.9
Por Mi Raza, 2017Silkscreen print18 x 12 in.Courtesy of the artist
Uprising at Harrison High School 1968, 2017Silkscreen print24 x 18 in.Courtesy of the artist
Carlos Cortez, a prolific Chicago printmaker, continued the political and cultural work of his immigrant parents by creating woodcut prints for the Industrial Workers of the World, an international labor union founded in Chicago in 1905 to which Cortez himself belonged for nearly 60 years. The first print, a poster for a 1984 show as part of the Chicago’s Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America and the Caribbean, depicts four figures protesting against the arrival of American troops in their home countries. The second, made for the Chicago Mural Group—a collective founded in 1971 and responsible for hundreds of public artworks across the city–shows a woman painting a mural wherein the proximity between the muralist’s brush and the bayonet clutched by one of the figures in the background suggests the potency of art as a political weapon.
¡Fuera! ¡No necesitamos mas tropas! (Out! We don't need more troops!), 1984 Woodcut printCollection of DePaul Art Museum, gift of Lisa Aarli2013.20
Chicago Mural Group, 1982Woodcut printCollection of DePaul Art Museum, gift of Lisa Aarli2013.19
Nicolás de Jesús hails from Ameyaltepec, a small village in La Mezcala, a Nahuatl region in the Mexican state of Guerrero. De Jesús arrived in Chicago in the late 1980s where he applied his training in painting and etching on traditional amate paper–an ancient paper made of the bark of wild fig, nettle, and mulberry trees–to create lively depictions of the city’s urban life. A founding member of the still active Taller Mexicano de Grabado (The Mexican Printmaking Workshop), de Jesús often employs Día de muertos imagery whose traditional calaveras, or skulls, also evoke the tradition of calaveras literarias, a satirical literary form that poked fun at the hubris of politicians and other public figures, reminding them of their mortality. By using traditional materials and imagery in such a way as to elevate them to the status of fine art, de Jesús challenges aesthetic hierarchies and notions of cultural superiority.
Chicago, 1990Etching and aquatint9 ½ x 13 ½ in.Collection of DePaul Art Museum, gift of Chuck Thurow2016.33
Chicago-based Mexican artist Rodrigo Lara creates memorials. Based on the Catholic iconography that covered the churches, chapels, and cemeteries of his childhood hometown, Lara’s sculptures combine classical figurative poses with the playful aesthetics of self-taught doodles and smiley faces. Superimposing these images on top of one another, the artist fuses together memories, in much the same way that we recall dreams or moments from the past.
His use of found materials within his compositions, such as fake grass, tile, animal hide, and percussion instruments is reminiscent of the aggregate components found at temporary gravesites in Mexico, or at the site of tragedies in the States: lovingly placed personal items that create portraits of the deceased as memorialized by their loved ones. These artworks, however, are a rebuilding or restructuring of general bodies through the materials. As we constantly grow and reinvent ourselves, individually and as a human race, these ephemeral materials set in contrast to the longevity of the artist’s clay sculptures become memento moris, or “reminders of death,” prompting us to celebrate the complexities of our ephemeral lifetimes and their lasting impacts.
Saint No. 1, from the Ephemeral Memorial series, 2019Porcelain, Astroturf, marble, metal, and wood11 x 5 x 7 in.Courtesy of the artist
Saint No. 2, from the Ephemeral Memorial series, 2019Porcelain, Astroturf, marble, metal, and wood11 x 5 x 7 in.Courtesy of the artist
Saint No. 3, from the Ephemeral Memorial series, 2019Porcelain, Astroturf, marble, metal, and wood11 x 5 x 7 in.Courtesy of the artist
Untitled 2, from the Paradiddle series, 2019Ceramic, animal stole, drum sticks, cowbell, and drum26 x 27 x 14 in.Courtesy of the artist
After the death of her young daughter, photography became therapeutic for Graciela Iturbide. According to the artist, photography allowed her to explore how “in Mexican culture people are afraid of death, that’s why they try to attack it straight on, so they play with it, they try to make light of it.” Collaborating with her subjects, Iturbide provides a poetic, yet sensitive vision of Indigenous rituals of remembrance veiled by Spanish, Catholic, and contemporary influences. Here, a young girl celebrates her first Holy Communion, a Catholic ceremony commemorating Christ’s sacrificial death, in a cemetery. Obscured by the skeletal mask, low-exposure further shrouds her identity.
Primera Comunion, Chalma, Estado de México (First Communion, Chalma, State of Mexico), 1985, printed 1998Silver gelatin print12 ¾ x 9 ¼ in.Collection of DePaul Art Museum, Art Acquisition Endowment Fund2003.57
El Buen Pastor, 1999Color Lithograph41 ½ x 29 ½ in.Collection of DePaul Art Museum, Vincentian Endowment Fund2009.157
Sam Kirk is best known for her large-scale murals throughout Chicago that celebrate marginalized communities. For Kirk, a vibrant color palette of multi-toned browns, blacks, and beiges is representative of the artist’s own multi-racial and queer identity, while symbolizing the various layers of any one person’s identity. Kirk weaves together stories from the working class and underrepresented communities with pride and optimism. More recently, she has shifted from making murals to stained glass, a material that is largely associated with windows in religious sanctuaries across the world. In Kali, the subject’s crowned, regal blue aura elicits a divine energy through her various shades of brown, transforming a contemporary woman into an icon.
Kali, 2019Stained Glass68 x 38 x 1 in.Courtesy of the artist
In his series America’s Finest, Vincent Valdez depicts figures of different ethnicities as boxers, poised and ready to enter the ring. In this particular work, Valdez represents a Native American boxer clad in a traditional war bonnet, whose name “Big Chief” is emblazoned upon his silk boxing shorts. However, the arrows that pierce his skin not only harken back to the violence of European colonization during the “discovery” of America, but also evoke imagery of Saint Sebastian who, according to Christian tradition, was persecuted for his beliefs and became a celebrated martyr. Saint Sebastian is said to have been shot full of arrows, yet miraculously survived. Valdez, by combining these two histories, suggests that Native Americans are martyrs akin to Saint Sebastian–a people whose enduring cultural presence cannot be eliminated by brute force. By filtering the past through the present, Valdez shows the way in which these histories continue to structure our world.
AMERICA'S FINEST, 2012Lithograph34 ⅞ x 23 ¾ in.Collection of DePaul Art Museum, Art Acquisition Endowment Fund 2014.207
Referencing the 20th-century Italian avant-garde movement Futurism, which celebrated technological innovation and industrial development, Salvador Jiménez-Flores inserts faces of Latinos into the body of a large ceramic “hybrid cactus” adorned with gold and silver inlays. An eagle, whose head is replaced with that of a masked luchador, suggests the possibility of Mexican immigrants ascending to positions of influence and receiving recognition for their contributions to American society. Using the cactus–a drought-tolerant plant capable of thriving under the harshest conditions– as a symbol for the resiliency of immigrant communities, Jiménez-Flores creates a monument to a more diverse and inclusive future.
Nopales hibridos: An Imaginary World of Rascuache-Futurism, 2017Terra-cotta, porcelain, underglazes, gold luster, and terra-cotta slip96 x 96 x 96 in.Courtesy of the artist
Nopales hibridos: An Imaginary World of Rascuache-Futurism, 2017Terra-cotta, porcelain, underglazes, gold luster, and terra-cotta slip96 x 96 x 96 in.Courtesy of the artist
Born in Mexico, raised in California, and living in Chicago, Salvador Dominguez translates the similarities, rather than the differences, between each of these cultures. Dominguez says, “the phrase ‘Mexican-American’ is a direct representation of my visual vocabulary. Cast in the role of interpreter between two worlds, I reference both.” Intersecting the experiences of blue-collar labor and construction materials with the artist’s childhood memories, a new language between seemingly contradictory worlds is created.
In Chicago Sewer H-02, a hand-made decorative towel is marred with the dirt and debris from the industrial streets of the city. Here, the artist makes a silicone mold directly from a Chicago manhole cover, catching its street-stained surface. He then applies several layers of thickly laid paint and aluminum sheeting into the mold to build the towel-like form and paints the “cross-stitched” flowers on the underside. Dominguez’s process of material repetition and replication is, in itself, a form of translation – the material version of a game of telephone, breaking down and building up the translation between the multiple layers of silicone mold, paint, and infrastructural support to arrive at the finished object.
Chicago Sewer H-02, 2018Cast/fused/painted acrylic, aluminum mesh, soil and street debris on cast bronze hanger16 x 24 in.Courtesy of the artistPhoto: Ian Vecchiotti
A duck, a Mexican mask, a domino, and a rabbit are interlocked with an ouroboros, an ancient symbol depicting a serpent eating its own tail. Benito Huerta connects seemingly unrelated yet deeply personal images to create a new meaning of “wholeness” and “rebirth,” as well as create a new aesthetic for Mexican empowerment. According to the artist, these images are “about my hybrid Anglo-Latin heritage as well as my relationship to popular culture, friends, family, and even the students I teach.” They also embody survival and defiance of artistic convention and negative socioeconomic considerations of race and class.
Rings of Life, 1998LithographCollection of DePaul Art Museum, Art Acquisition Endowment Fund2003.52
Enrique Chagoya’s Illegal Alien's Guide to the Concept of Relative Surplus Value explicitly engages the violent history of capitalism and imperialism by depicting a counter-history of the contemporary world on traditional amate paper–an ancient paper made from the bark of fig trees in the style of a codex, a pre-Columbian, Mayan civilization folding book. Imagery taken from a vast range of global visual traditions coexists with figures from popular culture–a process Chagoya calls “reverse anthropology”– while the perpetrators are depicted as various birds and hybrid monsters with cartoon-like speech bubbles quoting from Karl Marx’s 1867 magnum opus Capital. In this work, Marx introduced the concept of surplus-value to theorize the distinctive way in which capitalism exploits the unpaid labor of workers. Yet, as Marx showed, capitalism is only historically possible if there is first a period of “primitive accumulation,” the use of violence, war, enslavement and colonialism to dispossess native peoples from their land and resources, which Chagoya depicts in vivid detail across this work.
Illegal Alien's Guide to the Concept of Relative Surplus Value, 2009Color lithographCollection of DePaul Art Museum, Art Acquisition Endowment Fund 2010.5
Errol Ortiz was part of the Chicago Imagists artist group who, during the 1960s and 1970s, took their bold lines, design aesthetic, and surreal, figurative imagery from popular culture sources like comic books, tattoo art, thrift store knick knacks, and advertisements. Often humorous or sarcastic, much of the imagery found in Ortiz’s paintings critically reference the Vietnam War, politics, and consumerism. Ortiz describes himself as a “bully with color,” exemplified here with his use of the bold, aggressive red. This portrait—with its missile of a nose, industrial building as body, binocular-shaped glasses, and its patriotic, war-painted face—can be read as a stand-in for the military-industrial complex, or the complicated relationship between the government, the military, and the corporate businesses that directly support them.
Untitled, 1970Acrylic on canvas15 ⅜ x 13 ¼ in.Collection of DePaul Art Museum, gift of Jeff Zurlinden2010.14
Born in Honduras and raised in Belize, Derek Webster spent most of his adult life in Chicago where he worked as a custodian for the Chicago Public School system. Often working with found materials, Webster collected discarded objects for his sculptures, refashioning detritus into vibrant and playful works that deeply challenge the more refined visual codes of art history. Seurat Lady is a playful reference to Georges-Pierre Seurat, the 19th century French painter known for his pointillist technique and his depiction of Parisians of various social classes on the banks of the River Seine in works such as A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884–1886) displayed at the Art Institute of Chicago. Webster reimagines the chic, feminine figures of Seurat’s canvas by using a plastic bottle as the body of his sculpture, adorning it with bottle caps, beads, keys, chains, and other found objects that form an intricate layer of makeshift clothing and accessories.
Seurat Lady, 1998Mixed MediaCollection of DePaul Art Museum, gift of Chuck Thurow2016.123
On her daily walks with her dog through Chicago’s East Garfield Park neighborhood, Edra Soto collects the discarded liquor bottles that she comes across in vacant lots. These cognac bottles sparked an archeological exploration into the residents’ area, their daily rituals, the origin stories of liquors, and identity.
Cognac, much like champagne, is only named such if produced in particular regions of France. Originally introduced to Black soldiers abroad during the world wars, this elegant liqueur was rebranded, in the 1980s and 90s, to target urban Black men and saw its resurgence in popularity as it became associated with luxury in rap videos and advertising campaigns. In Open 24 Hours, Soto imbues her work with these tensions between class, socioeconomic status, luxury, and desire by placing stripped cognac bottles into screens of her design, which are emblematic of colonial architectural elements from porches in her native Puerto Rico.
Open 24 Hours, 2018Mdf screen, found bottlesCollection of DePaul Art Museum, Art Acquisition Endowment Fund 2020.9
Open 24 Hours, 2018Mdf screen, found bottlesCollection of DePaul Art Museum, Art Acquisition Endowment Fund 2020.9
Melissa Leandro works with textiles and found furniture to explore cultural identity and domestic space. She combines multiple techniques to create abstract compositions in fabric panels and upholstery, layering jacquard weaving, embroidery, and dyes. In fossil things, Leandro’s custom fabric has been mounted on stretcher bars and hangs on the wall like a traditional painting. fossil things expands upon ideas generated in Leandro’s sketchbook, as drawings inform stitched lines and embroidered floral patterns. Leandro thinks of her work as creating abstract environments parallel to her own emotions and state of mind.
fossil things, 2018Jacquard woven cloth, dye, stitching, embroidery55 x 46 in.Collection of DePaul Art Museum, Art Acquisition Endowment Fund2020.2
By providing an empowering platform for caregivers, artist Marisa Morán Jahn has helped to support those women who have been so critical to the artist’s own familial well-being. The CareForce One Travelogues mini-series recounts a road trip from New York to Miami whereby the artist, her collaborator, and her son meet with domestic workers to explore how care intersects with important contemporary issues, such as human trafficking, death and end-of-life planning, immigration, and discrimination in the workplace. Jahn’s art projects, animations, and interactive media have taken various forms since its inception, most recently including the development of CarePod, a housing facility for elders and their caregivers, who, by the nature of their in-home work, are often socially isolated.
CareForce One at a rally on steps of City Hall, Los Angeles from CareForce One Travelogues, 2016Courtesy of the artistPhoto: Marc Shavitz
Movie Poster from CareForce One Travelogues, 2016Courtesy of the artist
In this two-part work, Karen Dana examines the historical division between craft, often associated with women’s labor, and fine art. A handwoven blanket made by the artist was rolled with ink and used to make the image on the accompanying monotype print. The framed print and its contemporary art aesthetic is juxtaposed with the sagging fiber-based grid, a collision of the conversations around institutions of fine art and the domestic. Choreographic Underthings is part of a larger series of works in which Dana explores the history of labor and the care of others through the hands of different women. “I felt a lack of care when I moved to the United States, as an immigrant,” she states. “I was also the first one of my friends to have children so my work questions how my experiences as an immigrant are similar and different to my immigrant parents who moved from Syria to Mexico. They were alone raising their kids without a structure.”
Choreographic Underthings, 2019Monotype print on cotton paper and acrylic based paint on tapestry and inkPrint: 35 ½ x 52 in.Tapestry: 32 x 46 in.Courtesy of the artistPhoto: Jean Alexander Frater
Choreographic Underthings, 2019Monotype print on cotton paper and acrylic based paint on tapestry and inkPrint: 35 ½ x 52 in.Tapestry: 32 x 46 in.Courtesy of the artistPhoto: Jean Alexander Frater
Alfredo Martinez’s Boxing with Batman may be read as a contemporary reconceptualization of North American artist Robert Rauschenberg’s “combines” assemblages of the 1950s, in which Rauschenberg used found materials—like his own bed sheets—to further the idea that craft, assemblage, and painting are intimately intertwined.
While Boxing with Batman takes its title from the Batman bed sheets included at its center, it also references the artist’s physical battle with the work during its production. Martinez’s large swaths of crocheted yarn are an extension of his paintbrush gestures, with their loose ends like drips of paint, while the acrylic brushstrokes on the surface create a tightly knit weave and weft. Simultaneously meticulous and spontaneous, the artist’s physical approach to the application of his materials likens the work to the “masculine” application of paint associated with Abstract Expressionist artists such as Jackson Pollock’s action paintings, or Japanese painter Ushio Shinohara’s application of paint to his canvases using boxing gloves. Yet, Martinez complicates this idea by the very nature of his materials, which often have gendered associations to craft.
Boxing with Batman, 2016Acrylic paint, yarn, and fabricCourtesy of the artist
The infamous characters, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, from Robert Louis Stevenson’s late 19th-century novella, personify the eternal battle between good and evil and the dual personalities that can occur within a single person. However, for Mario Ybarra Jr., the sociocultural duality of being Mexican American in the United States is the driving force behind two self-portrait paintings: Dr. Jekyll, on view here, and Mr. Hyde, which is in the collection of Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). These paintings were part of the exhibition Universal Monsters, based on the 1920s to 1960s horror and sci-fi characters portrayed in Universal Studios films, which included revivals of both Jekyll and Hyde and Stan Lee’s The Hulk. Here, Dr. Jekyll, with his garish Day-Glo colors and mischievous smile is simultaneously superhero and villain. For Ybarra, this is a psychological exploration into stories of transformation and creating a persona.
Dr. Jekyll, 2012Acrylic on canvas60 x 48 in.Collection of DePaul Art Museum, gift of Scott J. Hunter2020.4Photo courtesy of Honor Fraser
Claudio Dicoceha playfully imagines the unlikely groupings of celebrities and public figures, and through appropriation and subversion, the artist challenges the genre of Casta painting, an 18th-century style of racially illustrative family portraits commissioned by nobility in New Spain and depicting supposedly natural hierarchies of mixed-raced or mestizaje individuals. Equivalent to the English word “caste,” Casta paintings were artistic representations used to reinforce the socio-racial classifications that were the object of the pseudo-scientific biological research and political hierarchies of the time. In De Amor Prohibido y el Anarquista, El Emcee 2.0—“Of Forbidden Love and the Anarchist, the Emcee 2.0”—a dark-skinned Albert Einstein is shown on a lowrider bicycle as the offspring of a black couple dressed in the traditional garments of British royalty. The couple, however, is comprised of Sid Vicious, the anarchistic punk rocker and member of the band Sex Pistols, and Selena, the celebrated Mexican-American singer whose most popular hit, Amor Prohibido, speaks of the unrequited passion of two lovers from different societies.
De Amor Prohibido y el Anarquista, El Emcee 2.0, 2014Color lithographCollection of DePaul Art Museum, Art Acquisition Endowment Fund2014.42
Tanya Aguiñiga is a Los Angeles based artist who was raised in Tijuana, Mexico. She holds an MFA in furniture design from Rhode Island School of Design and a BA from San Diego State University. Recent museum exhibitions include Disrupting Craft: Renwick Invitational 2018 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C. and Craft and Care at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York. Aguiñiga is a United States Artists Target Fellow in the field of Crafts and Traditional Arts, a NALAC and Creative Capital Grant Awardee. She is the inaugural fellow for Americans for the Arts Johnson Fellowship for Artists Transforming Communities. Her work is included in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) Decorative Arts collection and Contemporary Arts collection, as well as in the collection of the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) in New York, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and The Mint Museum in Charlotte.
Candida Alvarez is a Chicago-based artist and educator originally from Brooklyn, New York. She received a BA in Studio art and Liberal Arts from Fordham University in 1977 before going on to study at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Yale School of Art where she completed an MFA in Painting and Printmaking in 1997. Since 1998 Alvarez has taught painting and drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Alvarez has recently shown works at Monique Meloche Gallery, the Chicago Cultural Center, Hyde Park Art Center, GAVLAK Gallery in Los Angeles, and the Kemper Museum in Saint Louis, Missouri. Her works can be found in the permanent collections at DePaul Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, El Museo Del Barrio, among many others.
Born in Mexico City, Susy Bielak is a Chicago-based artist, educator, and curator. Educated at Macalester College and the University of California, San Diego, Bielak has also worked extensively as an Associate Director of Public Programs at Walker Art Center and the Block Museum. Her work has been collected and exhibited widely, including at the International Print Center, Museo Tamayo, San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, and Walker Art Center. Bielak has taught courses on a wide variety of subjects at Northwestern University, University of California, San Diego, and University of Minnesota.
Born in 1953 in Mexico City, Mexico, Chagoya studied economics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He moved to the United States in 1977, where he received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from the University of California at Berkeley. Chagoya has shown his work widely including in the important 2013 exhibition, Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art, at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. Today, his work is found in the collections of the Honolulu Museum of Art in Hawaii, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. Chagoya has taught at Stanford University in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University since 1995.
Born in 1923 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Carlos Cortez lived and worked in Chicago until his death in 2005 where he earned a reputation as a prolific artist, poet, printmaker, photographer, songwriter and lifelong political activist. Known in particular for his woodcut prints made for the International Workers of the World union, which can be seen all across Chicago and at Institutions such as the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In 1975, Cortez helped found the first Mexican arts organization in Illinois, Movimiento Artistico Chicano, or MARCH. He also became a fervent supporter of and frequent exhibitor at the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum. His work also is on display at the New York Museum of Modern Art and in galleries in such countries as Spain and Sweden. In addition to his papier-mâché sculptures, murals, prints and poems, he wrote three poetry books, edited a book on Posada and contributed to a number of others. For almost 20 years, he served as board president of Charles Kerr Publishers, one of the oldest working-class publishing houses in the world.
Karen Dana was born in Mexico City in 1982 and currently lives and works in Chicago. She earned a BFA from the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado in Mexico City in 2006 before going on to earn her MFA in Painting and Combined Media from Hunter College in 2011. Dana has since exhibited widely in Mexico and across the US including at venues such as Hyde Park Art Center, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, and Chicago Artists Coalition.
Nicolás de Jesús hails from Ameyaltepec, a small village in La Mezcala, a Nahuatl region in the Mexican state of Guerrero. De Jesús arrived in Chicago in the late 1980s, living and working in the city throughout the 90s and early 2000s. As a young artist, de Jesús studied under Felipe Ehrenberg (1943-2017), an influential Mexican artist and educator who referred to himself as a “neologist,” to highlight the unclassifiable and diverse nature of his artistic production. De Jesús was a founding member of the still active Taller Mexicano de Grabado (The Mexican Printmaking Workshop) and was the subject of a solo exhibition at the National Museum of Mexican art in 1992.
Born in San Luis Río Colorado, Mexico and raised on the Mexican/US border in southern Arizona, Claudio Dicochea holds an MFA in painting from Arizona State University, a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Studio Art from San Francisco Art Institute, and a BFA from the University of Arizona. His work has been shown at the Denver Art Museum, UCR ARTSblock, Snite Museum of Art (Notre Dame University), El Paso Museum of Art, Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juarez, McNay Art Museum, National Museum of Mexican Art (Chicago), BYU Museum of Art (Provo), Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, ASU Art Museum and was included in the 17th Biennale of Sydney.
Salvador Dominguez is a Mexican-born American artist based in Chicago. Dominguez earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008. He has exhibited widely in Chicago and across the country at venues such as the National Museum of Mexican Art, Western Exhibitions, and a recent solo exhibition at One After 909 (Chicago) in 2018.
Dianna Frid is a Mexican-born artist based in Chicago and associate professor of Studio Art at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Frid began her studies as an anthropology major before transferring to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she earned a BFA in 1991. Frid later completed her MFA in Fiber and Material Studies at SAIC on a full scholarship in 2003. Frid has shown widely at the Smart Museum, DePaul Art Museum, MCA Chicago, Gallery 400, and Alan Koppel Gallery, among many others. Her works belong to the permanent collections at the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Museum of Mexican Art, DePaul Art Museum, and the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection at SAIC.
Maria Gaspar is a Chicago-based artist and Assistant Professor at the Art Institute of Chicago. Gaspar holds an MFA in Studio Arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. Gaspar has exhibited at venues including the Chicago MCA, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, Artspace, New Haven, the African American Museum in Philadelphia, PA amongst many others. Gaspar is the recipient of numerous awards and grants including a Robert Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellowship, an Art Matters Grant, a Creative Capital Award, a Joan Mitchell Emerging Artist Grant, a Sor Juana Women of Achievement Award in Art and Activism from the National Museum of Mexican Art, and a Chamberlain Award for Social Practice at the Headlands Center for the Arts. Gaspar was named Chicagoan of the Year in the Arts in 2014 by art critic and historian, Lori Waxman.
Ester Hernandez was born in California’s San Joaquin Valley to a Mexican/Yaqui farm worker family. Hernandez graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and has had numerous national and international solo and group shows. Among others, her work is included in the permanent collections of the National Museum of American Art – Smithsonian; Library of Congress; Legion of Honor, San Francisco; National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago; Museo Casa Estudio Diego Rivera y Frida Kahlo, Mexico City; Museum of Contemporary Native Art, Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe, NM; Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Her artistic and personal archives are housed at Stanford University.
Born in 1952 in Corpus Christi, Texas, Beinto Huerta currently resides in Arlington, Texas, where he is professor of Art and Art History at the University of Texas, Arlington where he has been Director/Curator of The Gallery at UTA since 1997.. Huerta received a B.F.A. degree from the University of Houston, and his M.A. from New Mexico State University. Huerta has shown at the Houston Museum of African American Culture; the Wichita Falls Museum of Art; the Amon Carter Museum of American Art; the Glassell Gallery, Shaw Center for the Arts, Louisiana State University, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana; at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago and at the Ellen Noel Art Museum in Odessa, Texas. His work is in several museum and corporate collections throughout the United States. Huerta was the recipient of the Dallas Center for Contemporary Art’s 2002 Legend of the Year Award.
Born in Mexico City, Graciela Iturbide studied filmmaking at the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos between 1969 and 1972, and worked as an assistant to photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo. She met photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson while traveling in Europe, and in 1978, was one of the founding members of the Mexican Council of Photography. A major exhibition of her work, External Encounters, Internal Imaginings: Photographs of Graciela Iturbide was presented at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1990,in addition to retrospectives at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey in Mexico and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Her works belong to the permanent collection at such institutions as LACMA, MoMA, and the Brooklyn Museum among many others. In 2015, Iturbide was a recipient of the Cornell Capa Lifetime Achievement Award.
Luis Jiménez was born in El Paso, Texas, in 1940 and died in New Mexico in 2006. Jiménez studied art and architecture at the University of Texas in Austin earning a BFA in 1964. Following a brief stay in Mexico where in 1966 he completed post-graduate work at Ciudad Universitaria, Mexico City, D.F., Jiménez moved to New York before returning to the Southwest in the early 1970s. Known for his large public sculptures that are installed all across the country, Jiménez’s works belong to the permanent collection at numerous institutions including the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (Kansas City,) and the McNay Art Museum (San Antonio). Jiménez also taught art at the University of Arizona and later the University of Houston.
Alejandro Jiménez-Flores is a Chicago-based artist who attained a BFA in Studio Arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2012. They have had recent solo exhibitions at BAR4000, Heaven Gallery, as well as a two-person exhibition at Apparatus Projects and performances at Gallery 400 and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
Salvador Jiménez-Flores is an interdisciplinary artist born and raised in Jalisco, México. Jiménez-Flores earned a BAS in Graphic Design and Digital Media from Robert Morris University and an MFA in Drawing from Kendall College of Art and Design in 2014. He has presented his work at the National Museum of Mexican Art, Grand Rapids Art Museum, Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and Museum of Art and Design amongst others. He served as Artist-In-Residence for the city of Boston, Harvard Ceramics Program, Office of the Arts at Harvard University, and Kohler Arts Industry. Jiménez-Flores is a recipient of Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grants and The New England Foundation for the Arts. He is an Assistant Professor in ceramics at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Caroline Kent is a Chicago-based artist originally from Sterling, Illinois. Kent received a BS in Art at Illinois State University in 1998 before completing her MFA at the University of Denver in 2008. The recipient of a McNight Fellowship for Visual Arts (2016) and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2015), Kent has exhibited at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the FLAG Art Foundation in New York City, Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago, and the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, among many others. Her works are in the permanent collections at the Walker Art Center, Macalester College (Saint Paul, MN), and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Born and raised on Chicago’s South Side, Sam Kirk earned a BFA in interior design from the International Academy of Design and Technology, Chicago, in 2002 before completing an MFA in marketing at Columbia College in 2004. Kirk’s murals and public art projects can be seen all over Chicago and she has collaborated with countless brands including Marz Community Brewing, Grubhub, and WBEZ. Kirk’s works have appeared in museums and galleries across the country, including a recent piece about transgender identity that belongs to the National Museum of Mexican Art.
Born in Mexico in 1981, Rodrigo Lara Zendejas is a Chicago-based artist who received an MFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 2013 and his BFA, Summa Cum Laude, from the Universidad de Guanajuato in Mexico in 2003. Lara has had solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, the National Museum of Mexican Art, Kruger Gallery in Marfa, Texas, and Test Site Projects in Las Vegas, among others. He has been in such residencies as the Vermont Studio Center, ACRE, Ragdale, Mana Miami, Rogers Art Loft, and Cross Currents: Cultural Exchange. Lara has received many awards including an Emerging Artist Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation.
Las Nietas de Nonó is comprised of sisters Mulowayi and Mapenzi Nonó who live in Carolina, Puerto Rico. Las Nietas de Nonó have received the United States Artist Award (2018), The Art of Change from the Ford Foundation (2017), and the Global Arts Fund of the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice (2017). Their work has been shown in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, the United States, Scotland, Germany and England, having been recently included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial.
Melissa Leandro is a Chicago-based artist originally from Miami, Florida. Leandro completed her BFA and MFA in Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012 and 2017, respectively. She was awarded the Luminarts Fellowship (2017) from the Luminarts Cultural Foundation, Union League of Chicago. Leandro was a BOLT resident at the Chicago Artist Coalition for 2017-18, and was named one of Chicago's Break Out Artists of the year for 2018. Leandro has attended ACRE Residency,Wisconsin, Roger Brown House Residency, Michigan, The Weaving Mill, Chicago and TextielLab, The Netherlands and the Jacquard Center, North Carolina. Leandro currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as Lecturer and is the Assistant Director title of the Fiber Material Studies department. Leandro’s work can be found in public and private collections including the Federal Reserve of Chicago, BlueShield & BlueCross, The Estée Lauder Companies, New York, Brown Legacy Group, Hyatt Hotels Corporation.
Born in Seville, Spain, José Lerma lives and works in Chicago where he is an assistant professor of Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Lerma did his undergraduate studies at Tulane University and began to attend law school before he decided to pursue painting, receiving his MFA from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 2002. Lerma has shown works at Lehman Maupin Gallery (NYC), MCA Chicago, and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston in addition to having works in the permanent collections at the Milwaukee Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and many others.
Nicole Marroquin is a Chicago-based artist and educator She received an MFA from the University of Michigan in 2008 and is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Art Education at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Marroquin has recently been an artist in-residence at the Chicago Cultural Center, with the Propeller Fund at Mana Contemporary, at Watershed, Ragdale, ACRE and Oxbow. In 2015, Marroquin was invited to present research at the University of Chicago in conjunction with the exhibit The City Lost and Found: Capturing New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, 1960–1980 and at the Art Institute of Chicago for the symposium The Wall of Respect and People’s Art Since 1967. In 2017 she presented her art and research at the Hull-House Museum, Northwestern University and the MCA. Her essays are included in the Chicago Social Practice History Series, Revista Contratiempo, and AREA Chicago, Her work is in the permanent collection of the National Museum of Mexican Art. In 2012 Marroquin’s work was featured in the 1ro Bienial Continental de Arte Indigenas Contemporaria at the Museo Nacional De Culturas Populares in Mexico City. She was a Joan Mitchell Fellow at the Center for Racial Justice Innovation in 2014, and she received the Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz Women of Excellence Award in 2011 for her work in her community.
Born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1984, Alfredo Martinez graduated with a BFA from the Instituto Universitario de Estudios Superiores de Artes Plásticas Armando Reverón (IUESAPAR) in Caracas. He later earned an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012. In the years since, Martinez has been teaching and exhibiting his work at galleries in Caracas and has participated in art fairs across South America. His work has been sold in Venezuela, USA, Peru, and Colombia. Alfredo's work is connected to his childhood when he was treated for leukemia and art became an act of distraction.
Yvette Mayorga is a Chicago-based artist who holds an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Mayorga has exhibited at the Vincent Price Art Museum, EXPO Chicago, Untitled Art Fair, Art Design Chicago, LACMA's Pacific Standard Time, the Chicago Artists Coalition, the National Museum of Mexican Art, and GEARY Contemporary. Mayorga has attended the Fountainhead Residency, BOLT Residency, and is a recipient of the MAKER Grant. In 2020 Mayorga's work, "Meet me at the Green Clock," was commissioned by Johalla Projects as part of Andy Warhol's exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. She has been featured in ARTFORUM, Artnet, Chicago Magazine, Hyperallergic, Teen Vogue, The Guardian, and on the cover of the Chicago READER.
Born in Chicago, Harold Mendez currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Mendez earned a BA at Columbia College and later an MFA at University of Illinois at Chicago. He has exhibited widely at venues such as the MCA Chicago, ICA Los Angeles, the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, the Queens Museum, and participated in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. Mendez has received grants and awards from institutions and foundations such as the Kohler Art Center, The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and 3Arts among many others. His works belong to the permanent collections at the MCA Chicago, the Studio Museum Harlem, DePaul Art Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Ramón Miranda Beltrán lives and works in Puerto Rico where he completed his BFA in photography in 2008 at the Universidad de Puerto Rico before going on to complete his MFA in 2012 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is the recipient of a 2019 Pollock Krasner Foundation grant and a 2017 Joan Mitchell Foundation grant. His work has been exhibited in Europe, the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America.
An artist, filmmaker, and creative technologist of Ecuadorian and Chinese descent, Marisa Morán Jahn regularly teaches at Columbia University, MIT (her alma mater), The New School where she is an Assistant Professor, and lectures internationally. She is the founder of Studio REV-, a non-profit organization that codesigns public art and creative media co-designed with low-wage workers, immigrants, and women. Jahn’s work has been featured at venues ranging from worker centers to The White House to museums and festivals including the Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, Tribeca Film Festival, Asian Art Museum, New Museum, Art Brussels. Among many other, Jahn has focused on set of projects that amplify the voices of America’s fastest growing workforce, caregivers: two mobile studios (NannyVan, CareForce One), a Tribeca Film Institute-supported app for domestic workers that CNN named as “one of 5 apps to change the world,” and CareForce One Travelogues a film series for PBS/ITVS co-produced with Oscar and Emmy-winning filmmaker Yael Melamede.
Born in São Paulo, Brazil, Muniz moved to Brooklyn in 1983 after having originally studied advertising at the Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado de São Paulo. In the late 1980s Muniz began sculpting and soon took an interest in using unconventional materials such as chocolate syrup. Muniz would later participate in the 2000 Whitney Biennial, represent Brazil in 2001 at the 49th Biennale in Venice, and was featured extensively in Lucy Walker’s 2010 documentary Waste Land, which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary. Muniz has shown extensively and his work was the focus of major solo exhibitions such as Vik Muniz: Reflex, which traveled to MoMA PS1. Among many others, Muniz’s works belong to the permanent collections at MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim, and LACMA.
Born and raised in Chicago, Errol Ortiz was a former student at the School of the Art Institute in the early 1960s. Participating with the Chicago Imagists group, Ortiz continues to be an integral member of the city’s art scene and recently had a retrospective at the National Museum of Mexican Art, De Vuelta: Works by Chicago Imagist Errol Ortiz (2015-16). A true working class artist, Ortiz has held jobs, including delivery boy, pin setter in a bowling alley, delivery boy, meat market clerk, stock boy at Jewel, a runner for central wrap at Marshall Field's, bartender, bouncer, landscaper and grave digger, cab driver, factory worker and custodian, all of which he believes has deeply influenced his art. Ortiz got involved in Tae-Kwon-Do in 1966 and achieved 5th degree black belt.
Gala Porras-Kim is a Los Angeles-based artist originally from Bogotá, Colombia. As an undergraduate student Porras-Kim studied Art and Latin American studies at UCLA before going to complete her MFA at the California Institute of the Arts in 2009. She would later attend the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and earn an MA in Latin American Studies at UCLA, where she began learning Zapotec languages. In 2019, Porras-Kim participated in the Whitney Biennial and has exhibited at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Serpentine Gallery in London, the Brooklyn Museum, and MOCA Losa Angeles, among many others.
Diana Solís, a Chicago-based artist and educator, was born in Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico and raised in Pilsen. She holds a BFA. in Photography from the University of Illinois at Chicago and originally pursued a career in photojournalism working for local neighborhood newspapers such as the Westside Times, Lawndale news and Learner Booster Newspapers. Her paintings have been exhibited locally, nationally, and internationally, in both solo and group exhibitions including the Centre Civic Barceloneta, Barcelona, Spain; the Museo de Bellas Artes, Toluca, Mexico; Palacio de Gobierno, Morelia, Michoacán, Mexico; and in the Chicago area at Artemesia Gallery, ARC Gallery, the Aldo Castillo Gallery, the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum (now the National Museum of Mexican Art), the Museum of Science and Industry, Noyes Cultural Art Center in Evanston, and Woman Made Gallery, among others. A prolific teaching artist, Solís has worked for 30 years with schools and arts organizations, a testament to her belief in the power of the arts to challenge, transform, and empower youth and communities.
Born in Puerto Rico, Edra Soto is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist, and co-director of the outdoor project space THE FRANKLIN. Soto holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA from Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Diseño de Puerto Rico. She is also a Lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Soto has recently shown work at venues such as the Chicago Cultural Center, the Smart Museum, Pérez Art Museum Miami, and the MCA Chicago. Soto has attended residency programs at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Headlands Center for the Arts, Project Row Houses, and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. Soto was awarded the Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship, an Illinois Arts Council Agency Fellowship, and a 3Arts Foundation residency fellowship to Montalvo Arts Center. Most recently, she was the award winner of the inaugural Foundwork Artist Prize.
Vincent Valdez was born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1977 and currently lives and works in Houston, Texas. Valdez attended the Rhode Island School of Design on a full scholarship earning his BFA in 2000. Among many others, Valdez’s works have been shown at and belong to the collections at institutions such as The Ford Foundation, LACMA, MassMoCA, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, and the National Portrait Gallery. In 2005, Valdez attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and, in 2016, was the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant.
Born in Honduras in 1934 and raised in Belize, Derek Webster spent most of his adult life, beginning in 1964, in Chicago where he died in 2009 having worked as a custodian for the Chicago Public School system. Known for decorating his lawn and fence with found materials and sculptures, a Chicago gallerist, Paul Waggoner, once happened to take a wrong turn and wound up driving by Webster’s residence and offered Webster a solo exhibition at the Phylis Kind Gallery in 1982. He later showed works at the Dallas Museum of Art in a group show Black Art, Ancestral Legacy: The African Impulse in African-American Art (1989–1990). Webster’s works belong to the permanent collections at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, DePaul Art Museum, among others.
Mario Ybarra Jr. is a Los Angeles-based artist and Senior Lecturer at the Otis College of Art and Design. He is a founding member of the artists’ collective Slanguage. His work has been featured in a number of institutional exhibitions, including Alien Nation at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, the 2008 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Uncertain States of America, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, as part of the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art. Ybarra curated a ten-year survey of graffiti art at the Inshallah Gallery in Los Angeles, commissioned by the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.
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As part of our Latinx Initiative and our exhibition LatinXAmerican (January 7–August 15, 2021), DPAM is proud to partner with Ivan LOZANO of Archives + Futures (A+F), a podcast for and about Latinx and Indigenous visual artists of the Americas. LOZANO will interview ten artists featured in DPAM’s exhibition LatinXAmerican and each episode will be released every other Friday.
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**Check out our LatinXAmerican Spotify playlist!** This playlist curated by DJ CQQCHIFRUIT is a companion piece for walking through our galleries, either virtually or in-person. Jacquelyn Carmen Guerrero aka CQQCHIFRUIT is an interdisciplinary genderqueer artist and DJ of mixed Puerto Rican and Cuban descent, originally from Hialeah, FL. After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Communication from Northwestern University with concentrations in theater and performance in 2010, Guerrero became immersed in Chicago's LGBTQIA+ nightlife underground. DJing, performing, and organizing in queer nightlife spaces since 2012, they are a co-founder of TRQPITECA, an artist duo and multimedia event production company that celebrates queer art and dance music culture. The potential of communal dance floors as sites that empower radical embodiment, healing, and liberation is a focus of their personal and collaborative social practice.
LatinXAmerican was organized by current and former museum staff and student interns: Ionit Behar, Assistant Curator; Elyse Bluestone, Collection and Exhibition Intern; Mia Lopez, Assistant Curator; David Maruzzella, Curatorial Intern; Jade Ryerson, Arthur James Museum Studies Fellow, of DePaul Art Museum; and, Julie Rodrigues Widholm, Director, UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
Generous support for this exhibition and its related programming is provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Special thanks go to Hunter Lewis and DePaul University's Information Services team for building the museum's first robust virtual exhibition. For all photography, videography, and virtual tours, thank you to DPAM interns Sam Spencer and Lisandro Resto. The rich research guide also included on this site would not be possible without the help of Alexis Burson of DePaul University's John T. Richardson Library.
