Silvia Inés Gonzalez
Silvia Inés Gonzalez is a multi-disciplinary artist and educator in Chicago who actively participates in spaces where collective wellness takes on critical dialogue, art making, and community building. Her visual and audio work are a ballad to nostalgia--the borderline between myth and memory. Silvia has curated and facilitated workshops to address structures of power, imagination, 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, Multiuso, and the 96 ACRES Project. As an organizer for the group POC (People of Color) Artist Space, she connects artists of color from across Chicago to resources through meet-ups and development opportunities. She fiercely believes in the power of people, poetic intervention, and possibility.
Silvia went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and received degrees in Photography and Art Education. She has a master’s from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she wrote a thesis on the work done with The 96 Acres Project describing methodologies for engaging radical possibility frameworks with young people. Her action-based research engaged community knowledge and grassroots justice work in the classroom where young people were encouraged to consider the ways in which artistic intervention, storytelling, and education become multiple and interconnected points for liberatory departure.
Her teaching and community arts-based programming include workshops for spaces such as Woman Made Gallery, the 20 Neighborhoods Project in Albany Park’s Centro Autónomo, Jane Addams Hull House, Northwestern Academy, The Art Institute's Ryan Education Teacher Programs, Street Level Youth Media, Gallery 400, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Hyde Park Art Center, and as a full-time educator in Chicago's public and private school settings. She was awarded a 3Arts Make A Wave Award in 2018.
