Juan Angel Chávez is a multimedia artist constantly involved in arts education and community based public art as well as in maintaining an active studio practice. Since 1994, he has held a residency with C.A.P.E. (Chicago Arts Partnership in Education), and a teaching artist position at The Hyde Park Art Center’s Creativity Camps, lead artist with Gallery 37 Schools Program. For the past nine years he has been active artist member of Chicago Public Art Group.

Chávez is a recipient of the prestigious 2001 Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Individual Artist award. Chávez frequently shows at galleries around Chicago and the Midwest. In 1993, Chávez exhibited his constructions at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s 12x12 space. He was recently awarded a Chicago Transit Authority commission to create a public art piece for the Damon Station of the Blue Line.


Juan Angel Chávez Artist Statement

I hold a lot of things back. My creative sense is not right on the surface. I work out of frustration. I walk around Chicago. I’m aware of everything around me, even the little pieces of paper that fly by. My work is political, not in the sense that I’m dictating a message or idea, but by the action of finding and re-forming stuff.

I walk where very few people go, through post-industrial, pre-gentrification places, observing how nature integrates itself into the structure of culture. I find my materials. Every piece has a history, a personality. Every piece describes where and how we live; together they form a language.

I work through so many frustrating layers of uncertainty. I don’t work out of preconceived images because I don’t believe that life is that dogmatic. Some imagery comes out of my unconscious. The meanings of objects and imagery are nomadic within a piece: sometimes they rest for a long time and then they fall into place and then they emerge again.

My personal public art projects are like growths. They often begin on a layer of text as in a postered wall, but then the image evolves; it grows like mold; the surface of the walls erupt as the piece becomes 3D. After a piece has been developed I often return it to urban space—allowing the new mixture to become part of the cycle of deterioration and recombination.

I also make collaborative public art. For each project, I reinvent the process to investigate and reconsider people’s images and issues. I draw a new visual language out of the participants. We try to get rid of previously manufactured esthetic and intellectual guidelines and together we create a whole other language that people were not expecting. I do community public art because of its selflessness: it changes the atmosphere. It gets people motivated and creates hope. It changes people’s attitudes towards each other.


Hopes and Dreams, 2002, broken ceramic tile, by Juan Angel Chávez and Corinne Peterson.


What We See—Lo Que Vemos, 2001, acrylic on concrete, byJuan Angel Chávez.


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