Contigo, Diana Solís is a convening of photographs, artists, and communities. Rather than being structured as a “solo show,” Contigo: Diana Solís commemorates the social- and community-based dimensions of Solís’s photographic practice by bringing artists into creative dialogue. Born in Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico in 1956, Diana Solís (they/them) has lived and worked in Chicago for over sixty years. This exhibition features Solís’s newly printed photographs, originating from film shot in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as their recently created digital photographs, made since their return to photography in 2020. These past and present photographs attest to Solís’s enduring commitment to documenting the people, places, and activities that form Latinx, LGBTQIA+, immigrant, and feminist communities in Pilsen and across Chicago. The recirculation of Solís’s archival photographs and revitalization of her practice today are intertwined, sustained by care, reciprocity, and labor. As the photographs in this exhibition underscore, portraiture is a strong source of this continuity. Whether their subject is a friend, acquaintance, or someone they just met, Solís’s honorific portraits exemplify their awareness of how photography, as a fundamentally social medium, asks us to behold each other.

The artists taking part in this exhibition reflect how Solís, as an educator, activist, and photographer, has long collaborated intergenerationally and continues to forge ever-expanding networks across generations in and beyond Chicago. The exhibition invites visitors to locate resonances among works by Solís and participating artists, while recognizing the specificities of their distinct social commitments, personal and collective histories, and sensibilities. In creative correspondence with Solís, these works act as points of intersection that help us understand art making as a practice done together, for our communities, and in response to others.

Featuring artworks by: Sandra Antongiorgi, Oscar Arriola, Samantha Friend Cabrera, Elle Muñoz Diaz, William Estrada, Maria Gaspar, Jackie Guataquira, Juan Molina Hernández, Sarita Hernández, Marylu E. Herrera, Colleen Keihm, Sam Kirk, Nicole Marroquin, Mony Nuñez, Sandra Oviedo, Clau Rocha, Vanessa Sanchez, CHema Skandal!, Akito Tsuda, and Nicholas Zepeda.

Image credit and caption: Robert Ford, Trent Adkins (co-founders of Thing magazine), C.C. Hunt, and Diana Solís after a portrait session at Solís’s apartment and photo studio, above the Swan Club on North Clark Street, 1981.

Reworking Labor is a three-part curatorial research project: an international symposium, exhibition, and publication led by scholars, curators, and editors Daniel Eisenberg and Ellen Rothenberg.

Made in collaboration with Rios and Romero, our installation Ballad of the Uprooted (2019) uses sound recordings, photographs, archival documents, ephemera, and artifacts, alongside architectural constructions that function simultaneously as boundaries, enclosures, and mechanisms of display. As a creative and scholarly production, this installation examines the history of migrant crop labor and the depiction and conscription of agricultural work through policy, political rhetoric, personal narrative, and media representation. This research-based project seeks to complicate settled notions of labor politics, which tend to center the urban and industrial, by taking into account agribusiness, crop working, and the racialization of U.S. labor histories. This project poses questions about how crop-oriented political activism developed along migrant labor trails and how crop dusting and pesticide production subjected communities and labor forces of color to racist environmental practices. Furthermore, we examine the ways that creativity has been deployed through El Teatro Campesino and migrant song traditions as both tools of communal consciousness raising and ways to generate aesthetic pleasure. Drawing upon archival research conducted in New Mexico and Texas, as well as personal archives and family histories, Ballad of the Uprooted develops parafictional accounts and speculative archives that trace the exploitation of migrant crop workers within a U.S. political and agribusiness framework.

In addition to our installation, I created a free takeaway artist’s publication which featured an introductory essay and an interview with my father Joe Ledezma. We Eat All the Way Down to the Green takes its title from a statement made by my father, who emigrated from Coahuila, Mexico to the Texas Hill Country in the 1960s with his parents and siblings.

Most recently, Rios and I co-authored the chapter “Photographs from the Fields: The Digital Activism of the United Farm Workers” for the Reworking Labor book (2023), edited by Ellen Rothenberg and Daniel Eisenberg. Documentation of Ballad of the Uprooted was also published in the Reworking Labor book.

Image credit: Installation photograph by Tom Van Eynde, 2019.

Resounding the Archive at Echo Amphitheater (2019) activates research conducted at the Center for Southwest Research (Albuquerque) and the State Records Center & Archives of New Mexico (Santa Fe). Through sculptural assemblage and public performances at Echo Amphitheater in northern New Mexico, we engaged documents, flyers, photographs, newspapers, letters, moving images, and audio files related to the activities of La Alianza Federal de Mercedes (The Federal Alliance of Land Grants). Alianza, founded in 1963, sought to reclaim estates issued to Mexicans by the Mexican and Spanish government prior to the U.S.-Mexico War (1846–48). As a product of Spanish colonialism which led to the deprivation and displacement of Indigenous peoples, the original Mexican grants are a complication within the historical narrative maintained by Alianza. Our work addresses this problematic aspect of the land-grant movement through critical cartography and an exploration of Chicanx indigeneity. The research—and the imaginative reenactments produced as a result of our inquiries—work to collectively examine how history can be constructed with political commitments through intervention and experimental storytelling.

Project supported by the Santa Fe Art Institute’s Truth and Reconciliation Residency, 2019.

Image credit and caption: Photograph made by Deanna Ledezma and Josh Rios in Echo Amphitheater, Carson National Forest, June 18, 2019. Ledezma stands on top of a park bench and holds a stack of papers. The top print is a photograph of Patsy Tijerina being confronted by law enforcement officers.