Chocaya | Llorar/Gritar Weep/Cry Out mixed media, National Mexican Museum of Art, Dia De Los Muertos, 2023
Living Presence, NMMA, 2022-2023
Chocaya | Llorar/Gritar Weep/Cry Out mixed media, 2023
An array of thorns and prickles bloom on the surface offering protection. They take on their individual shape as pointed protectors while working together as a collective force of care and resistance. In the flower’s center is a portal making a path for remembrance and refuge. The center is a portal and flag, the colors represent resistance, unity, and spirit. A gilded marigold is held out as a gift from the sun, a guidance path toward rest, a medicinal concoction for the deep grief—the loud cry (chocoya): ni una menos.
The exhibition memorializes women around the world who have been violated, disappeared or murdered, with a large installation by eighteen local artists. This year the Mexican community lost distinguished artists and dear friends whose lives and work we will also celebrate.
https://nationalmuseumofmexicanart.org/events/dia-de-muertos-living-presence
With flowers, food, and drinks, we await the return home of loved ones who no longer walk this Earth. The living presence of loved ones is felt on the Day of the Dead (November 1 and 2) by offering them what they enjoyed in life. This ancient tradition, with Mesoamerican and Spanish roots, unites Mexicans on both sides of the US/Mexico border as they create ofrendas and altars in homes, cemeteries, galleries, and museums to celebrate their lives.
Curated by Dolores Mercado and Gustavo Herrera
Parable of Portals: Memory, Grief, Rest, Mixed Media Installation, Chicago Art Department, 2023
On Mending, Chicago Art Department, 2023
Parable of Portals: Memory, Grief, Rest, Mixed Media Installation, 2023
Parable of Portals is an altar dedicated to Memory, Grief, and Rest. The hands tell a story of what was, is, and is yet to come. They place us at the cusp of transience. Palms and hands read like cartographical poems--crossing and splitting like branches-- holding and supporting like roots much like the collective of the people within the story. A field guide of collaged imagery invites us to allow our bodies, in this case, hands, to be the bearer of our stories this time. Seeds, acupuncture, tea, and references to flowers remind us that after the storm comes the sun--that cycles of death and rebirth, origin, and newness are a composition of what makes us tender and real. The installation includes woven patches made by Lydia Saravia as emblems of connection.
https://chicagoartdepartment.org/on-mending-2023-jan-13-28-2023/
On Mending brought together local creative practitioners led by Chicago Art Department Resident Artist Silvia Inés Gonzalez to discuss topics of repair as an art form for liberation.
Through critical discussion and skill-share opportunities, participants examined generational, societal, environmental, and familial bonds ruptured by colonialism, extractive capitalist complexes, migration, and politically incited trauma. In centering well-being, grief work, and exploring what moving at the speed of deliberate trust looked like, participants explored the layered conceptualization of mending.
By sharing mutual responsibility in the learning process, the group formed relational connections needed for a community praxis rooted in activism, abolition, organizing, healing, and collective care. On Mending has become a portal to the possibilities of coming together with the myriad languages of love at the center.
In Flux, Compass to Now|here with artists Patricia Nguyen and Joseph Josue Mora, Chicago Cultural Center, 2020. Photographs by John Lee.
In Flux: Chicago Artists and Immigration, Chicago Cultural Center, 2020
In Flux: Chicago Artists and Immigration is a continuation of the 2018-2020 project Living Architecture – a large-scale, multidisciplinary exhibition, with public programming including performances, tours, workshops, and conversational dinners that highlight the influence and impact of immigrant artists on Chicago. In Flux responds to the current political climate to highlight how Chicago was built with immigrant labor, particularly in the arts, and is continuously shaped today by exemplary immigrant artists.
Compass to Now|here: When questioning how political and social spaces are formed, what are the intersections between now, here, and nowhere? Compass to Now|Here is a multilayered artists’ book project archiving Chicago's history of settlement, resettlement, unsettlement, justice, and labor movements, in larger connection to national immigration policy. At the core of Compass to Now|here are values rooted in a community's well-being and a right to self-preservation in alignment with the right to play, work, and will. Artist Silvia Gonzalez, Joseph Josue Mora, and Patricia Nguyen collaborate on a multidisciplinary piece including the performance of assembling the Compass to Now|here while simultaneously enacting the labor of archiving movement in capacity-building and literal shifting geography due to forced displacement and or general need to move.
For this exhibition, a workshop for Compass to Now|Here was hosted with Silvia Ines Gonzalez, Patricia Nguyen, and Joseph Josue Mora—inviting participants to critically engage our city's historical and narrative framework by joining artists in a virtual investigation of the installation. The public is invited to share their own stories around settlement, resettlement, and unsettlement as it pertains to individual experiences around living, organizing, and the geographical shifting that continues to shape the way our city is experienced. Join the artists for a reading of the work's context as well as an art making and participatory invitation to become part of the work's archive. View on YouTube.
Featured artists of In Flux include: Alberto Aguilar, Kioto Aoki, Amanda Assaley and Qais Assali, Yesenia Bello, Tom Burtonwood and Maryam Taghavi, Derek Chan, Eugenia Cheng, Julietta Cheung, Sabba Elahi, William Estrada, Silvia Gonzalez with Joseph Josue Mora and Patricia Nguyen, Óscar I González Díaz, Lise Haller Baggesen, Rodrigo Lara Zendejas, Benjamin Larose, Kirsten Leenaars, Wen Liu, Yvette Mayorga, Frédéric Moffet, Sherwin Ovid, Roni Packer, Emilio Rojas, Moises Salazar, Jan Tichy, Orkideh Torabi, Ji Yang, and others. For additional images of the installation, please visit the City of Chicago Department of Culture Affairs and Special Events.
Volver, Hyde Park Art Center, 2017
Volver, The Dojo, 2017
Volver, quiero.
The installation included a looping audio collage, recontextualizing the narrative of return. While on bus rides between Mexico and the US, changes were highly audible and visual informing a narrative of the shifting states of change in culture, language, and space.
Front and Center, Hyde Park Art Center, 2017
What is a home built between stolen land and a bus ride north? /What is home but the flesh /carried on your bones—/a knee so keen on continuing without you./An achilles sprung on promise, /a hand bent on building a shelter? / Coming home has always been the/ timbre of my mother’s laughter, / the task of remembering two cities with one stone./ The smell of dirt sun and city moon. / Coming home is combing two languages between my fingers./ Your tongue split in two at the borderlands /
--a desert mouth roaming a city of promises / beg for aqui y alla y todo / you sharpen an obsidian arrow to extract a heart from your own body/ If only to re-member what mezcal y sal aches to return to. / Y me muero por volver.
When a yearning points toward a missing home and a long-lost lover, where does the “departed” arrive? In shifting between borders and boundaries, what remains the same upon the return and changes over time? Is the desire to return about the familiar or is it about the memory of something that never quite was? Volver | Return is a visual ballad dedicated to memory, and nostalgia—an attempt to turn boundaries into ambiguous spaces. Volver | Return references the bridges between family history and necessary survival that happens despite removal from the place of “origin.” It navigates what spatial transcendence might look like when the idea of “ Volver | Return” becomes a translated memory.
Front & Center is the culminating show from our Professional Development offering, Center Program, offering the unique opportunity over six months for artists to evolve their practice. The program includes feedback from guest artists, gallerists, critics, and professionals in the field, the opportunity to connect with a peer network, and ultimately produce strong new work to show.
Guest curated by Caroline Picard, Executive Director and Head Curator of The Green Lantern Press and Co-Director of Sector 2337, Front and Center features work by 25 artists across a variety of media. “It’s been a real pleasure meeting with students from the Center Program and seeing their work develop over the last several weeks,” says Picard. “The combined energy of this diverse group of artists reflects themes that have emerged organically in our discussions together.”
https://www.hydeparkart.org/exhibition-archive/front-and-center-2017/
At the Borderlands: Mitos | Memory, ACRE Projects, 2017
Llorona. Experiments in the frequency of distance, grief, loss, and release.
The installation included audio pieces Cantares and the Water Loop.
Cantares became a hollowed space to perceive loss.
Water Release was a looping audio collage and invited exhibition attendees to participate in adding to the audio collage by releasing what needed to be released into the water. while recording was in progress.
At The Borderlands: Mitos | Memory, ACRE Projects, 2017
“The very act of writing then, conjuring/coming to 'see', what has yet to be recorded in history is to bring into consciousness what only the body knows to be true. The body - that site which houses the intuitive, the unspoken, the viscera of our being - this is the revolutionary promise of "theory in the flesh” ― Gloria E. Anzaldúa
Mitos| Memory connects the land, water, body, memory, and loss. Using myths of la llorona to situate loss, mourning, and narrative, myth, and memory were put into question--what is remembered, how, and for what purpose? Inspired by the work of Gloria Anzaldúa’s ideas of borderland, poetry was created to situate how memory and myth can often become indistinguishable, and when losses are incurred in that nepantla state how we re-member is vital. Is lover always loss? How is grief tied to lover as both elemental and environmental when addressing environmental loss? What haunts us from what once existed? How does one release and move what needs to be released to catalyze healing?
The following title cards and wall text allowed me to embody the essence of La Llorona in weeping at the intersection of Mitos + Memory.
If you look, she is there, still haunting everything she caressed. The rocks will always remember her--the way the moon’s gravity sang her into a sort of breaking mo(u)rning. She would sway in tune. Every living thing was changed by her movement. -La Llorona
When she is split in two she weeps. It is not natural for her body of earth to be separated from her body of water. -La Llorona
You could hear the echo haunting where there once rippled loving vibrations. Her core hummed when she knew love. -La Llorona.
Cihuacóatl warned us of this--she is the mother weeping for her children. At night she emerges from the water like a lullaby.
-La Llorona
Loss tastes like yearning on a dry tongue. -La Llorona
She wept. Even in destruction, Cihuacóatl created something. That was her blessing and curse. To create life and death, then weep. - La Llorona
More information on ACRE: https://www.acreresidency.org/