Nicole Marroquin

Nicole Marroquin is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and teacher educator whose work explores spatial justice and Latinx history. Marroquin works with youth and communities to decenter dominant narratives and to address displacement and erasure. Her current work explores belonging through histories of student rebellions in Chicago Public Schools from 1968 to 1980. Through research and creative practice, she aims to recover and re-present histories of Black and brown youth and women’s leadership in the struggle for justice in Chicago. 

Marroquin has presented her work at the Kochi Biennale, the Annual Conference of the American Association of Research Librarians, University of Maine, New York Archivist Round Table, Jane Addams Hull House Museum, Northwestern University, DePaul Museum of Art, on WLPN Lumpen Radio, Gallery 400, Hyde Park Art Center and more. Her essays are included in the Visual Art Research Journal, Counter-Signals, the Chicago Social Practice History Series, Revista Contratiempo, Where the Future Came From, and Organize Your Own: The Politics and Poetics of Self-Determination Movements. She has been an artist in residence at the Chicago Cultural Center supported by the Propeller Fund at Mana Contemporary, at Watershed, Ragdale, ACRE, Oxbow, and was recently awarded the coveted USA Artist Fellowship, recognizing the most compelling artists working and living in the United States today. 

Marroquin’s appearance in the series happens in tandem with an exhibition at the Institute for the Humanities Gallery which combines documentary photographs from influential artist, teacher and friend Diana Solis with Marroquin’s own creative work in response to Diana’s imagery. Solis’s documentary photography reflects 25+ years of transnational Chicana and lesbian organizing, primarily in Chicago and Mexico City between 1975 – 1990. The exhibition is intimate, illuminating, bold and irreverent, capturing the energy and endurance derived from Marroquin’s experience attending to the temporarily lost collection of photographs, as well as the lineages of care-work that have emerged throughout the process. 

Presented in partnership with the Institute for the Humanities, with support from the University of Michigan Department of American Culture — Latina/​o Studies Program. Series presenting partners: Detroit Public Television and PBS Books. Media partner: Michigan Radio.