Nicole Marroquin

With Care
by Nicole Marroquin

February 16–March 22, 2023
Institute for the Humanities Gallery, 202 S. Thayer
Gallery hours: M-F 9am-5pm

Related Events

Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series: “With Care” by Nicole Marroquin
Thursday, February 16, 2023
5:30pm
Michigan Theater, 603 E. Liberty

Opening Reception and Q & A with Nicole Marroquin 
Thursday, February 16, 2023
6:30-8pm
Institute for the Humanities Gallery, 202 S. Thayer

Nicole Marroquin is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator whose practice explores spatial justice and Latinx history. Deeply rooted in community, she cultivates and reaffirms the human connections that ultimately sustain us. Her recent work explores the emergent themes of belonging as seen through the histories of student rebellions in Chicago public schools between 1968 and 1980.

Her site-specific installation With Care, created for the Institute for the Humanities Gallery, presents the documentary photographs of influential Mexican-born artist, teacher, and friend Diana Solís in visual dialogue with Marroquin’s own creative work which includes ceramic sculptures and printmaking. Solís’s photography reflects over 25 years of transnational Chicana and lesbian organizing primarily in Chicago and Mexico City between 1975 and 1990. 

With Care is intimate, illuminating, bold and irreverent, capturing the energy and endurance derived from Marroquin’s experience recovering this under-recognized collection of photographs. It also embraces the longtime friendship between these two women artists.

In a time that more fully recognizes the importance of taking care of ourselves and of one another, the installation brings to light the real commitment that care requires—the attention, the tending to, the safe keeping, the trust—in order to ensure the survival of the Solís collection and other archives like it for future generations. The project honors the endless lineages of care-work that have emerged throughout the ongoing process of preservation.

With Care visually articulates the complex and exquisite nature of the human relationships that bind us through patterns, colors, images and forms. Marroquin’s vision for this installation is abounding, riotous, uproarious, and unapologetic. The artist inhabits the gallery space with the exuberance and volition of an unstoppable comet.

And if that’s not love, what is?

-Amanda Krugliak, Institute for the Humanities Arts Curator 

Nicole Marroquin is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and teacher educator whose work explores spatial justice and Latinx history. Marroquin works with youth and communities to decenter dominant narratives and to address displacement and erasure. Her current work explores belonging through histories of student rebellions in Chicago Public Schools from 1968 to 1980. Through research and creative practice, she aims to recover and re-present histories of Black and brown youth and women’s leadership in the struggle for justice in Chicago. 

Marroquin has presented her work at the Kochi Biennale, the Annual Conference of the American Association of Research Librarians, University of Maine, New York Archivist Round Table, Jane Addams Hull House Museum, Northwestern University, DePaul Museum of Art, on WLPN Lumpen Radio, Gallery 400, Hyde Park Art Center and more. Her essays are included in the Visual Art Research Journal, Counter-Signals, the Chicago Social Practice History Series, Revista Contratiempo, Where the Future Came From, and Organize Your Own: The Politics and Poetics of Self-Determination Movements. She has been an artist in residence at the Chicago Cultural Center supported by the Propeller Fund at Mana Contemporary, at Watershed, Ragdale, ACRE, Oxbow, and was recently awarded the coveted USA Artist Fellowship, recognizing the most compelling artists working and living in the United States today.