From Sept. 28 through Aug. 1, 2027, Grounds For Sculpture will present a solo exhibition of work by Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist Salvador Jiménez-Flores. The exhibition, “Raíces & Resistencias,” is curated by GFS executive director Gary Garrido Schneider.
Jiménez-Flores’ work is intended to be playful and provocative, addressing critical issues of migration, “cultural hybridity” and resilience. A native of Mexico who moved to Chicago at age 15, he seeks to center his creative work on his experiences as a bicultural immigrant.
The exhibition, which will be on view in the sculpture park’s East Gallery and outdoors, offers an opportunity for Jiménez-Flores to recontextualize an existing work, “Caminantes/Wayfarers,” and to create two site-specific pieces that feature slip painting and portrait forms. Grounds For Sculpture has also commissioned a bronze cast sculpture, which will be on view outdoors during the exhibition and will be a new addition to GFS’s permanent collection.
“We’re excited to partner with Salvador to debut three new works and exhibit an existing work, ‘Caminantes,’ all of which speak to the experience of migration and migrants’ hybrid identities and resilience,” said Gary Garrido Schneider, executive director at Grounds For Sculpture, in a statement. “During a time when art and artists are being silenced, GFS continues to be artist-led and responsive to the world we live in.
“Salvador’s work tells a broader, more nuanced story about what it means to be from more than one place—and how artwork can help us understand each other better.”
Jiménez-Flores said that the challenge of being bicultural and bilingual is that he lives concurrently in two different worlds.
“I adapt to both worlds, but adapting involves losing some part of myself in order to grow,” he said. “I embrace these two worlds in my art, melding visual and cultural references from both to produce artwork with a magical realism twist.”
On the 80-foot wall in the East Gallery, Jiménez-Flores created “Memoria, Tierra, Trabajo: A Glimpse of the Semiquincentennial,” a mural painted with earthen pigments. At a time when the United States is celebrating the 250th anniversary of becoming a nation, this mural looks to present an unfolding timeline and counter-narrative of colonization, labor and migration in the Americas.
On the gallery’s opposite wall, the installation “Gritos grabados en la penca del nopal” (“Screams engraved on the prickly pear cactus paddle” features a central portrait of the artist surrounded by ceramic nopal (prickly pear cactus) paddles and incendiary flames with messages of protest serving as a collective expression intertwining personal and political narratives.
Outside the gallery in the park’s hedge garden and along its Main Loop will be two large scale bronze sculptures that incorporate a hybridization of the human form with the nopal and symbols emblematic of Mexico and Mesoamerica. The first work, “Caminantes,” was previously displayed in Manuel Perez Jr. Plaza in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood, which is known for its immigrant population.
It features shiny bronze feet topped with green nopal ‘legs,’ commemorating migrants and the movement inherent to their journeys. The nopal, whose name is derived from the Nahuatl word nopalli, is a resilient plant that thrives in droughts and other harsh conditions.
The second work, “La resistencia de los nopales híbridos: El Susurro del Desierto/The Resistance of the Hybrid Cacti: The Desert’s Whisper,” was commissioned by GFS and will become part of its permanent collection. Both of these works are intended to serve as metaphors for the strength and endurance of marginalized communities. They seek to envision a future where hybrid identities are celebrated rather than excluded. Through the series, Jiménez-Flores hopes to offer a poignant and hopeful vision of what it means to resist, adapt, and thrive in the face of adversity.
Grounds for Sculpture says that the body of artwork asks observers to reflect on the complex and intertwined history of migration and identity at both the individual and geopolitical levels, particularly within the current intensified context of migration and mass deportations. “Raíces & Resistencias,” which translates to roots and resistance, seeks to honor those who cross borders with resilience, driven not solely by opportunity, but by the need for survival, dignity and the right to dream.
Grounds For Sculpture will hold a special preview day for its members on Saturday, Sept. 27. Reservations are required. Grounds For Sculpture is open Wednesdays through Mondays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Salvador Jiménez-Flores, born in Jalisco, Mexico in 1985, is associate professor and chair of ceramics at the School of Art Institute of Chicago. He participated in the 2022 GFS exhibition “Fragile: Earth,” which was co-produced with The Color Network, an organization of which he was a former organizing member.
He is also an organizing member of the Instituto Gráfico de Chicago, an organization inspired by the socio-political art of Mexico’s Taller de Gráfica Popular (The People’s Print Workshop) and uses art as a platform to inform and generate community discourse about urgent social issues.
A recipient of many awards, fellowships, grants, and residencies, Salvador Jiménez-Flores has been an artist in residence at the Harvard Ceramics Program, Office of the Arts at Harvard University; the John Michael Kohler Arts/Industry, in Wisconsin; the Museum of Glass, in New York; and Haystack Mountain School of Craft, in Maine.
He is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grants, The New England Foundation for the Arts, Threewalls’ RaD Lab+Outside the Walls Fellowship Grant, and is a 2021 United States Artist Fellow. Jiménez-Flores is also an organizing member of the Instituto Gráfico de Chicago.
His work has been exhibited at the National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago; the Grand Rapids Art Museum, Grand Rapids, Michigan; the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, Nebraska; and the Museum of Arts and Design, New York.
