Mary Fair Croushore Graduate Fellow
About
“The Artist as Community Archivist: A Chicago Case Study”
My dissertation focuses on Chicana/o art networks in the city of Chicago from the 1970s-1980s with an emphasis on the importance of community based archival practices. I explore Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood as a hub of grassroots art activism within the city, focusing on an a historical timeline framed by two historical touchpoints: the opening of cultural arts center Casa Aztlan in the early 1970s and ending with the 1987 decision to include more Latina/o artists in the National Museum of Mexican Art. Current research on Pilsen has been devoted to highlighting legacies of social activism, but the interventions of artists and community art projects within activist organizing have yet to be explored. My work is unique in that it is a Latina/o Studies project with an Archival Studies lens. I posit that community-centered arts such as muralism and printmaking are not just an aesthetic practice but also a form of critical archival practice within the Chicano movement. This reframing raises new questions about the interconnection between self representation and spatial justice. My study of art as archival practice yields new insights about the art history of social justice movements in Chicago, even as it interrogates inherited hierarchies of historiography and the archive by exploring community archiving as an organic and integral part of art as a social practice. This project helps scholars understand how community based art was not just a representational project, but also an archival one. By using the Pilsen neighborhood as the historical landscape of this case study I show how the relationship between memory and art creates a community based toolkit for documenting social justice movements that actively resists symbolic annihilation within the city of Chicago’s archival record.
Pau Nava is a Ph.D. Candidate in American Culture.
