The print-based artist, activist, and educator William Estrada presents twenty years of work in Multiples and Multitudes. Estrada’s socially-engaged practice is rooted in Chicago neighborhoods, where he collaborates with youth, community members, teachers, and artists to reimagine public and educational spaces to unite people and amplify local voices. The exhibition will bring together works by the Mexican artist, his collaborators, and students that exemplify his radical commitment to empowering communities through art-making and agency. Drawing inspiration from the Chicano art movement and Taller de Grafica Popular and spanning print, photography, performance, and video, William Estrada’s work is committed to political advocacy with and for communities of color. This exhibition is the outcome of Estrada’s participation as a Radicle Resident Artist in the Jackman Goldwasser Residency at Hyde Park Art Center. Multiples and Multitudes is curated by Mariela Acuña, Exhibitions & Residency Manager, in collaboration with the artist.
About William Estrada
William Estrada was born to immigrant parents and grew up assembling memories in California, Chicago, and Mexico. His teaching and art making practice focus on exploring inequality, migration, historical passivity, cultural recognition, self-preservation, and media representation in marginalized communities. He documents and engages experiences in public spaces to transform, question, and make connections to established and organic systems through discussion, creation, and promotion of counter narratives. He has worked as an educator and artist with Telpochcalli Elementary School, Chicago Arts Partnership in Education, Hyde Park Art Center, SkyArt, Marwen Foundation, Urban Gateways, DePaul University’s College Connect Program, Graffiti Institute, Prison + Neighborhood Art Project, and The School of The Art Institute of Chicago.
William’s practice attempts to record complex stories, ignored spaces, and the on-going struggle to connect urban life, academia, and the mainstream. His work is a discourse of existing images, text, and politics that appoints the audience to critically re-examine the meanings of their surroundings. As a teacher, artist, cultural worker, and urban anthropologist he reports, records, reveals, and imparts experiences you find in academic books, school halls, city streets, television sets, teacher lounges, kitchen tables, barrios, college campuses, and in the conversations of close friends.
