For this panel and social hour join artists and educators Jorge Lucero (University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana), Olivia Gude (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), Silvia Gonzalez (Franklin Fine Arts), Alice Costas (Northside College Prep), Janani Nathan (Nicholas Senn High School), Alejandro Colunga, Jr. (Back of the Yards College Prep High School), Vanessa Sanchez (National Museum of Mexican Art) and Andrea Yarbrough (in c/o: Black Women, Cooperation Racine) for a conversation on the evolution of arts education in Chicago. Together, they offer insights into the diverse approaches and personal experiences that have shaped their practices.

Following their discussion, attendees are invited to connect with retired, practicing, and incoming educators in the gallery. As part of Learning Together: Art Education and Community, this program is a gathering space where past, present, and future art educators can share their thoughts, approaches, and personal journeys in the field. Food and refreshments will be served.

ABOUT:

Jorge Lucero is a Mexican-American artist and Full Professor of Art Education at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he also serves as Associate Dean for Research in the College of Fine and Applied Arts. He previously chaired the Art Education program from 2015 to 2023. Lucero’s work explores “school as material,” and he has exhibited, performed, published, and taught widely both in the US and abroad. His notable publications include Mere and Easy: Collage as a Critical Practice in Pedagogy (2016), What Happens at the Intersection of Conceptual Art and Teaching? (2023, with Catalina Hernandez-Cabal), and Teacher as Artist-in-Residence (2020). In 2023, he received the National Art Education Association’s Higher Ed Educator of the Year Award. Lucero is an alum of The Pennsylvania State University and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Before academia, he co-developed an education-as-art practice at Northside College Prep High School in Chicago.

Olivia Gude is the Chair of Art Education and the Angela Gregory Paterakis Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Professor Emerita of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Gude has created many award-winning collaborative mural and mosaic projects. In recent years, she has united her work as a community artist and as an art educator by creating participatory spaces in which teachers investigate and re-invent the social practices of art education. These include organizing a Manifesta of Art Education at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2012 and Skeptical Assessment Society events at Virginia Commonwealth University, the Art Educators of Iowa conference, the Missouri Art Education Conference, and the New York State Art Teachers Association. 

Silvia Inés Gonzalez is a Chicago artist, cultural worker, curator, and educator, 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. Gonzalez 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, ACRE, and local grassroots art spaces. She is a member of the Chicago ACT Collective and the 96 ACRES Project. She was awarded the 3Arts Make a Wave Award in 2018, CAC + OtherPeoplesPixels Maker Grant in 2020, The Illinois Humanities Envisioning Justice Grant in 2022, The Ignite Fund in 2023, and Art Design Chicago/Artists Run Chicago in 2024. She’s an organizer and administrator of (People of Color) Artist Space and a Co-Lab resident at the Chicago Art Department.

Alice Costas is an artist, educator, and writer living and working in her beloved hometown, Chicago, Illinois. She came to the Chicago Public School system from community arts organizations and has been trying to instill that ethos in her ten years in the classroom, most of which have been at the high school she graduated from. Costas is a proud rank-and-file member of the Chicago Teachers Union, which is also her home base for community organizing. Outside the classroom, she is passionate about contributing to creative and welcoming communities, the progressive and labor movements, printmaking, fiber arts, and large collaborative artistic projects.

Janani Nathan is a tattoo artist and a visual arts educator with Chicago Public Schools, and they strive to create curriculum and a classroom community that uplifts young people to feel comfort in vulnerability when sharing their experiences through visual art. Throughout the year, Janani’s classroom carefully explores and visualizes our connections to emotionally and environmentally relevant concepts through drawing, painting, animation, graphic design, ceramics, and textiles.

Alejandro Colunga, Jr. is an artist and art educator born and raised in Pilsen currently working as a Visual Arts Teacher at Back of the Yards HS. His first introduction to the arts and art education came from his cousins who taught him graffiti at an early age. Those same cousins then introduced him to Yollocalli Arts Reach where he would spend 10 years working at various capacities ranging from intern to program coordinator. In that time, Colungas arts practice has grown to include printmaking, muralism, writing and teaching.

Vanessa Sanchez is the Director of Education and Yollocalli Arts Reach at the Nation Museum of Mexican Art (NMMA). Born and raised in Chicago, Vanessa has dedicated her career to enhancing her communities. She has served as an arts administrator, program director, and mentor in the cultural sector for over 15 years. Vanessa is a creative, civic-minded leader dedicated to enhancing her communities by designing and facilitating numerous community art initiatives. She has collaborated with hundreds of youth, artists, journalists, media producers and civic leaders throughout Chicago garnering national and international recognition. Vanessa holds a BFA in Painting from the University of Illinois at Chicago, was an ambassador for the Creative Youth Development Summit in Boston, previously served as Board Vice President for Villapalooza, the Little Village Music Fest, and is an artist collaborator in the Chicago Artists Creating Transformation (ACT). She completed the 2020 Leadership in Democracy program through the McCormick Foundation and in 2024 was a graduate of the Civic Leadership Academy (CLA) through the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.

Andrea Yarbrough is a multi-disciplinary artist, curator, and educator based on the South Side of Chicago, nurturing sites of care through a blend of civic engagement and art praxis. Her praxis is embodied through the collaborative placekeeping initiative called “in c/o:” (in care of), which brings together writers, curators, farmers, mamas, dancers, organizers, teachers, cultural producers, youth, and visual artists to collectively exhume the (in)visibility of care for Black women.

Andrea’s process transforms quotidian materials that are slated for waste streams into designed and utilitarian objects that serve as community resources. She incorporates the impact of solidarity and circular economies at material, individual, and communal scales. By constructing functionally designed objects, cultivating land, archiving and documenting histories of Black women, and curating exhibitions and public programs, her socially-engaged practice exemplifies how communities can reclaim and reconstruct their surroundings while navigating agency and ownership over underutilized space.


ACCESS INFORMATION: This program is free and open to the public. For questions and access accommodations, email gallery400engagement@gmail.com