Silvia Gonzalez is a multi-disciplinary artist and educator in Chicago creating spaces where collective wellness takes on critical dialogue, art making, and community building.  Her visual and audio work is a ballad to nostalgia--the borderline between myth and memory. Silvia has curated and facilitated workshops to address structures of power, imagination, repair, collective care, play, confinement, and freedom. Her work has been exhibited at The National Mexican Museum of Art, Woman Made Gallery, Hyde Park Art Center, MdW Fair, Chicago Art Department, ACRE, and local grassroots art spaces. She is a member of the Chicago ACT (Artists Creating Transformation) Collective and previous collaborator in the 96 ACRES Project. As the organizer and administrator of (People of Color) Artist Space, she connects artists of color from across Chicago to resources through social meet-ups, salons, and development opportunities. Two extensions of POCAS include POCAS Salon, a co-learning space for artists to connect across various topics and ideas, and POCAS + Friends--inviting intentional relationship-building as a means of support and care. Silvia has recently developed Sala: A Living Room of Ideas on Lumpen Public Radio. Sala invites artists, cultural workers, and civically minded people to discuss liberation, education, organizing, community, and practices toward healing. She is a current Co-Lab resident at Chicago Art Department.

Silvia Gonzalez attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with two BFA’s one in Photography and the other in Art Education. She has a master’s from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she wrote a thesis on the work done with The 96 Acres Project describing methodologies for engaging radical possibility frameworks with young people. Her action-based research engaged community knowledge and grassroots justice work in the classroom where young people were encouraged to consider how artistic intervention, storytelling, and education become multiple and interconnected points for liberatory departure. As part of this research, middle school students found the connections between mental health and youth incarceration rates to combat systemic racism and classicism to educate the larger public on what abolition would require of us.

Her teaching and community arts-based programming include workshops for spaces such as Woman Made Gallery 20 Neighborhoods Project in Albany Park’s Centro Autónomo, The Jane Addams Hull House for Cities of Peace, Northwestern Academy, The Art Institute's Ryan Education Teacher Programs, Street Level Youth Media, Gallery 400, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Hyde Park Art Center, and as a full-time educator in Chicago's public and private school settings.