Academic Resources
Campus Resources
University Resources
Information For
Learned Objects brings together four Chicago-based artists—William Estrada, Regin Igloria, Nicole Marroquin, Rochele Royster—whose socially engaged practices are developed alongside an equally robust object-making practice. While all are seasoned activists, educators, and pillars of their local communities, the result of their collaborations with the public extends beyond classrooms and the city streets into the artist's studio. The objects created in the studio environment are inflected by collective intelligence and shared knowledge. Seen in this light, a "learned" object is both a material and conceptual site for encounters between social relations, lived experience, and community history.
Objetos aprendidos reúne a cuatro artistas residentes de Chicago (William Estrada, Regin Igloria, Nicole Marroquin y Rochele Royster) cuyas prácticas socialmente comprometidas se desarrollan en conjunto con una práctica igualmente robusta de creación de objetos. Si bien todos son activistas experimentados, educadores y pilares de sus comunidades locales, el resultado de sus colaboraciones con el público se extiende más allá de los salones de clases y de las calles de la ciudad hacia el estudio del artista. Los objetos creados en el estudio están influenciados por la inteligencia colectiva y el conocimiento compartido. Desde esa perspectiva, un objeto "aprendido" es a la vez un sitio material y conceptual para encuentros entre las relaciones sociales, la experiencia vivida y la historia de la comunidad.
For the past 25 years, William Estrada has integrated his pedagogical experience in schools and arts organizations with his studio practice in order to facilitate a community-based model of arts engagement. In Portraits of Resolution (2014-present), Estrada stationed a mobile photography studio in front of the Cook County Courthouse for one month and invited curious passersby—many of whom were coming to and from court—to pose for a portrait in front of a chalkboard-like backdrop. Each subject wrote their own message reflecting on the criminal justice system and the effects of mass incarceration. In doing so, they challenged the traditional logic of portraiture. By encouraging the participation of community members often excluded from art-making, Estrada's project amplifies the voices of underrepresented Chicagoans while simultaneously empowering them to imagine alternative futures for their city.
A longtime resident of Chicago's Northwest neighborhood Albany Park, Regin Igloria founded North Branch Projects in 2010, a free artist-run space that offers community bookbinding experiences. Alongside a collection of ten handmade sketchbooks, Igloria presents a series of new sculptures and works on paper that negotiate the movement of bodies of color through urban space and the natural world, in an effort to challenge the inherited romantic notions of nature. An avid runner, hiker, and cyclist, Igloria’s sculptural objects reference and reimagine the equipment associated with endurance sports from the metal barriers that line the routes of marathons––the same routes that are often the sites of protests and marches––to the rickshaw a cyclist might employ on a long-distance ride.
For Pilsen-based artist Nicole Marroquin, the very process of shaping and firing ceramics is itself a political gesture. The production of ceramics, one of the oldest object-making techniques dating back millenia, is itself premised upon solidifying natural materials into durable forms that can survive long into the future. In this way, the production of ceramics becomes both a means of preserving and asserting existence. These works reveal symbolic harmonies with Marroquin’s more public-facing projects, which include researching the history of political movements by Latinx youth in Chicago, and shaping public schooling as an activist teacher of teachers. Conceptualizing the studio as a retreat for processing and expressing the complex dimensions of civically-engaged life, Marroquin's sculptural practice displays a tension between public and private, the personal and the political, and the potentially revolutionary aspect of recovering lost traditions.
A Chicago Public School teacher for nearly 20 years, Rochele Royster's extensive background in art therapy informs both her holistic pedagogical practice and her community-based art projects. For Dolls 4 Peace (2015–2020), Royster invited children, teachers, and community members across Chicago to create handmade dolls as a means for addressing trauma and gun violence. Having amassed more than 1,500 dolls since the project's inception, the process of constructing the dolls out of humble materials––yarn, fabric, beads, feathers––becomes a meditative and memorializing act that gives young people the space to address their real concerns often ignored in traditional school curricula. When installed together, the dolls form a monument-like tapestry that upon closer examination reveals the intimate way in which structural violence deeply affects the youngest members of the city's communities.
Please visit this link to learn about and register for our free public programs
See events
Learned Objects is curated by Rachel L. S. Harper, Ph.D., and organized by DePaul Art Museum staff.
