Salvador Jiménez-Flores: Raíces & Resistencias
Salvador Jiménez-Flores: *Raíces & Resistencias* explores migration, cultural hybridity, identity, and resilience through mural painting, ceramics, and bronze sculpture. Drawing on his experience as a bicultural immigrant from Mexico, Jiménez-Flores combines visual and cultural references from Mexico, the United States, and Mesoamerica with elements of magical realism.
The exhibition presents a mural, a ceramic installation, and two outdoor sculptures that consider the histories of colonization, migrant labor, exclusion, violence, and cultural erasure. Together, the works honor people who cross borders in search of survival, dignity, and the freedom to imagine a better future.
When: Sunday, September 28, 2025 through Sunday, August 1, 2027
Location: East Gallery and outdoors at Grounds For Sculpture
Featured works: The 80-foot mural *Memoria, Tierra, Trabajo: A Glimpse of the Semiquincentennial* uses earthen pigments to create a timeline and counter-narrative about colonization, labor, and migration throughout the Americas. The installation *Gritos Grabados en la Penca del Nopal* places a portrait of the artist among ceramic nopal paddles and flames bearing protest messages. Outdoors, *Caminantes/Wayfarers* and *La resistencia de los nopales híbridos: El Susurro del Desierto/The Resistance of the Hybrid Cacti: The Desert’s Whisper* combine human forms with nopal imagery and Mexican and Mesoamerican symbols.
About the artist: Salvador Jiménez-Flores, born in Jalisco, Mexico, in 1985, is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago. He is an associate professor and chair of ceramics at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work addresses migration, cultural hybridity, and resilience, particularly through the perspective of his life as a bicultural immigrant. He is also an organizing member of the Instituto Gráfico de Chicago and previously participated in Grounds For Sculpture’s 2022 exhibition *Fragile: Earth*.
Artist background: Jiménez-Flores has held residencies at the Harvard Ceramics Program, the John Michael Kohler Arts/Industry program, the Museum of Glass, and Haystack Mountain School of Craft. His honors include a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, support from the New England Foundation for the Arts, a Threewalls RaD Lab+Outside the Walls Fellowship Grant, and a 2021 United States Artists Fellowship. His work has been shown at the National Museum of Mexican Art, Grand Rapids Art Museum, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and Museum of Arts and Design, among other institutions.
Artwork details: *Memoria, Tierra, Trabajo* was created in 2025 with clay slip and oxides and measures approximately 15 by 89 feet. *Gritos Grabados en la Penca del Nopal*, also from 2025, uses clay slip, oxides, and ceramic in variable dimensions. *The Resistance of the Hybrid Cacti: The Desert’s Whisper* is a 2025 cast-bronze sculpture measuring 109 by 92 by 36 inches, with a 36-by-72-by-72-inch base. *Caminantes/Wayfarers*, created in 2023, is made of cast bronze and Cor-Ten and measures 99 by 48 by 48 inches.
Schedule: This is an on-view exhibition; no event-specific showtimes are listed.
Run time: Not applicable to this on-view exhibition.
Ages: No age restriction is listed.
Tickets: Price not available
Accessibility: The page provides no event-specific accessibility information.