Pros Arts Studio (working title) is the first presentation on the long arc of the Pros Arts Studio ensemble and its influential legacy on Chicago’s art and education scene. Established in 1978 as a non-profit organization, the Pilsen-based entourage has offered free, diverse artistic workshops and entertainment to Chicago’s communities across streets, parks, community centers, and local K-12 schools. Its members, Lionel Bottari, Douglas Grew, Rosalie Mancera, Elvia Rodriguez Ochoa, and Jean Parisi, are puppeteers, clowns, and performing artists committed to highlighting the role artists have in enriching the lives of the communities in which they live. The group has integrated lively arts programming within the curricula of public schools, initiated the first Día de Los Muertos Parade in Pilsen, and hosted Hotline 21, a Chicago Access Network Television call-in show that amplified student voices on social issues.

Growing out of multi-year relationship that resulted in an installation for Learning Together: Art Education and Community (2024-25), this exhibition incorporates materials from their archives—print ephemera, photographs, videos, handmade performance sets—with newly commissioned works by contemporary artists, former collaborators and students, including Alberto Aguilar, William Estrada, Maria Gaspar, Mauricio Lopez, Alan Medina, Jiashun Zhou, and others. Selected artists have been invited to develop new work that responds to the ensemble’s archive and/or invokes aspects of the ethos that has powered their multifaceted work for nearly fifty years. Pros Arts’ characteristic aspects include longevity, memory, improvisation, ephemerality, embeddedness, community, cultural specificity, joy, silliness, imagination, self-determination, challenging institutional models, and collaboration.

Alberto Aguilar, William Estrada, Maria Gaspar, Mauricio Lopez, Alan Medina, Pros Arts Studio, Jiashun Zhou, among others.

Support for Pros Arts Studio is provided by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the School of Art & Art History, the College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts, and the University of Illinois Chicago.