Nicole Marroquin
Student Activism Collages Commemorating High School Walk Outs, 1968-1973

Nicole Marroquin uses art, archives, and living testimonies to make connections between youth-led political movements and spatial justice. Her collaged screen prints chronicle the high school walkouts organized by Black and Latinx students in Pilsen and Little Village neighborhoods on Chicago's West Side between 1968-1973. At the time, students advocated for themselves, agitated and were brutally confronted by Chicago police. As a companion exhibit to the Claiming Space: Creative Grounds and Freedom Summer School exhibition (on second floor of museum), Marroquin’s work reflects on the ways in which the experiences of student activism fight to claim and reclaim spaces. 
 
Nicole Marroquin is a transdisciplinary artist, strategist, researcher, concerned parent, and faculty in the Department of Art Education at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2015, Marroquin was invited to present research at the University of Chicago in conjunction with the exhibit The City Lost and Found: Capturing New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, 1960–1980 and at the Art Institute of Chicago for the symposium The Wall of Respect and People’s Art Since 1967. Recently, she was a Joan Mitchell Fellow at the Center for Racial Justice Innovation, a Propeller Fund awardee and Artist In-Residence at Mana Contemporary Chicago with the collective Multiuso.

This installation is a part of Claiming Space: Creative Grounds and Freedom Summer School, on the second floor of the Museum. Claming Space is part of the Making the West Side project at Jane Addams Hull-House Museum. Making the West Side: Community Conversations on Neighborhood Change is an ongoing project funded through the National Endowment for the Humanities that brings together scholars, activists, neighborhood residents, and other stakeholders to investigate the history of neighborhood change on Chicago’s West Side.