LatinXAmerican
DePaul Art Museum
January 7–August 15, 2021
Artist and ACT lecturer Marisa Morán Jahn’s (SMVisS ’07) “Careforce One Travelogues,” a PBS and Sundance-supported film exploring the U.S.’ fastest growing workforce — caregivers — is featured at LatinXAmerican, an exhibition at DePaul Art Museum in Chicago. Other artists include Tanya Aguiñiga, Gala Porras Kim, Enrique Chagoya, Maria Gaspar, Vik Muniz, Mario Ybarra, Jr., and others.
By providing an empowering platform for caregivers, artist Marisa Morán Jahn has helped to support those women who have been so critical to the artist’s own familial well-being. The CareForce One Travelogues mini-series recounts a road trip from New York to Miami whereby the artist, her collaborator, and her son meet with domestic workers to explore how care intersects with important contemporary issues, such as human trafficking, death and end-of-life planning, immigration, and discrimination in the workplace. Jahn’s art projects, animations, and interactive media have taken various forms since its inception, most recently including the development of CareHaus, a housing facility for elders and their caregivers, who, by the nature of their in-home work, are often socially isolated.
LatinXAmerican is an intergenerational group exhibition featuring nearly 40 Latinx artists from Chicago and beyond. The exhibition assesses the presence and absence of Latinx artists in DePaul Art Museum’s collection, and reflects efforts to build in this area as part of a multi-year initiative to increase the visibility of Latinx artists and voices in museums, working towards equity and lasting transformation. Occupying all of the museum’s galleries, LatinXAmerican includes photographs, paintings, works on paper, sculptures, textiles, videos, and installations primarily drawn from DPAM’s collection, including several recent acquisitions, as well as new works from artists living throughout the United States and Puerto Rico.
This museum-wide exhibition explores the shifting—and at times contradictory—social, cultural, political, and artistic identities between Latinx artists of different circumstances and generations. The term Latinx is used here as a nonbinary, gender-inclusive alternative to Latino or Latina for people of Latin American heritage living primarily in the United States. Not every artist in the exhibition identifies as a Latinx artist, some prefer national, racial, and/or ethnic designations of identity, therefore we encourage you to explore the artists’ diverse backgrounds.
