Grounds For Sculpture To Present 'Salvador Jiménez-Flores: Raíces & Resistencias' This Fall

From September 28, 2025 - August 1, 2027, Grounds For Sculpture (GFS) will present a solo exhibition of work by Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist Salvador Jiménez-Flores, curated by GFS Executive Director Gary Garrido Schneider. Jiménez-Flores' work is both playful and provocative, addressing critical issues of migration, cultural hybridity, and resilience. As a native of Mexico who moved to Chicago at age 15, he centers 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. “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.”

“The challenge of being bicultural and bilingual is that I live concurrently in two different worlds. I adapt to both worlds, but adapting involves losing some part of myself in order to grow,” shared Salvador Jiménez-Flores. “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 Semiquincentenial, a mural painted with earthen pigments. At a time when the United States is celebrating the 250th anniversary of becoming a nation, this mural presents an unfolding timeline and counter-narrative of colonization, labor, and migration in the Americas. Jiménez-Flores' family has migrated between México and the United States over three generations through programs that invited migrant labor to build railroads or to work in agriculture. This movement is part of a broader history of migratory patterns across the Americas that predate European contact and colonialism. The exchange of ideas, cosmologies, food traditions, languages, art, and people has been a constant flow long before the current border lines were established or trade agreements and/or tariffs defined our economies. Layered with cultural references and symbols, the mural weaves the difficult histories of exclusion, violence, and erasure, transforming itself into a living document of memory and the possibility of justice.

On the gallery's opposite wall, the installation Gritos grabados en la penca del nopal 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. The "gritos" (cries or screams) provide a powerful emotional release, a declaration of freedom, and a demand for justice and human dignity.

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 México 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 serve as metaphors for the strength and endurance of marginalized communities. They envision a future where hybrid identities are celebrated rather than excluded. Through this series, Jiménez-Flores offers a poignant and hopeful vision of what it means to resist, adapt, and thrive in the face of adversity.

This body of artwork asks us 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, honors those who cross borders with resilience, driven not solely by opportunity, but by the need for survival, dignity, and the right to dream. These works invite us to consider the power of art to speak truth, to remember, to evoke empathy, to foster understanding in an increasingly diverse society, and to point us towards a better future.

Salvador Jiménez-Flores: Raíces & Resistencias is made possible, in part, by the Brooke Barrie Art Fund. Support is provided, in part, by The New Jersey State Council on the Arts, a division of the NJ Department of State, and a partner agency of the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Atlantic Foundation.

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