Nicole Marroquin prints hippie designs atop images of police confronting student protesters during the Harrison High School walkouts of 1968, when demands for bilingual and bicultural education met up with a zeitgeist of flower power and civil rights. Street artists need be fast on their feet, as must others: Errol Ortiz, a Chicago Imagist and one of the senior figures in the show, traces the deadly ubiquity of guns in “Serenely Absorbing Passionless Violence,” a mesmerizing pattern painting in which weapons, skeleton parts and bullet-riddled bodies interweave.
OUTSET ISLAND PIANO SHEET MUSIC FREE
The graffiti artist Miguel “Kane One” Aguilar sprays a drippy, hazy Xanadu on an indoor wall and also offers free running tours of public art in Pilsen, a neighborhood known for its murals (the next tour takes place at 10 a.m. The perils and aesthetics of urban life figure everywhere. Sahagun’s breathtaking “Lonely Moon Rides High” is really just a battered scrap of wood screwed into a silvery insulation panel. Salvador Jimenez-Flores molds a harsh futuristic landscape in which cactuses hybridize with humans to create a resilient mestizo race. Ivan Lozano strings up pretty translucent links of packing tape covered in transfer images sourced from internet coverage of brutal drug cartel executions. Rodrigo Lara Zendejas’s riff on the Voladores de Papantla, an ancient Mesoamerican ritual that involves four men flying downward on twisting ropes from a 90-foot-high pole, puts muted beribboned sculptures of immigrants into an endless, disorientating tailspin. Yvette Mayorga’s “Make America Sweet Again” uses piped frosting and construction materials to concoct an overwhelming diorama of border-related anxieties. There are towering cakes, swirling ribbons, paper chains, golden cactuses and the possibility of dancing under a rising moon, but nothing is quite what it seems. Much of what fills the exhibition, whose title translates as “Present Memory,” looks festive at first glance. Some names are familiar - Alberto Aguilar, Maria Gaspar and Juan Angel Chavez have all been in prominent local shows in the past year - and others less so.
(Great rallies usually have something jubilant to them, just as magnificent fetes ought to be at least partly subversive.) Thirty of the most exciting artists of Mexican descent working in the Chicago area today have been invited, and they’re as diverse a cohort as is the population served by the museum, ranging in age from 26 to 76 in birthplace from the state of Jalisco, in western central Mexico, to Moline, in northwestern Illinois in media from woodblock prints to store-bought wigs. Instead “Memoria Presente” is a protest-as-party. With facts and figures and tweets like these, the party cannot be just a celebration.
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