Arts + Public Life Announces the Irving Harris Foundation Public Art Project

Featuring new commissioned work by Chicago based artist Yvette Mayorga

Photo by Kevin Penczak 2022

About the Artist

Arts + Public Life (APL) has launched the Irving Harris Foundation Public Art Project, commissioning Chicago-based artist Yvette Mayorga to conceive, fabricate, and install a large-scale work on the Arts Lawn, APL’s outdoor green space on the Arts Block. Over the course of the project, Mayorga will be supported with studio space, project funding, and sustained curatorial and administrative partnership to realize a new work that contributes to the cultural and built environment of Chicago’s Washington Park neighborhood—creating new opportunities for gathering, reflection, and shared experience on the South Side.

In collaboration with the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture (CSRPC), Mayorga will also develop public programs that engage diverse communities on and off campus and participate in dialogue with UChicago students through critiques and roundtable discussions.

Yvette Mayorga is a multidisciplinary artist based in Chicago, Illinois. Her work links feminized labor and the aesthetics of celebration to colonial art history and racialized oppression through the guise of using pink as a weapon of mass destruction. She fuses confectionary labor with found images to explore the meaning of belonging. Mayorga holds an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Mayorga’s first East Coast solo museum exhibition, Dreaming of You, at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, is on view through March 2024. In 2023, Mayorga had her first major solo museum exhibition, What a Time to be, at The Momentary, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY; Vincent Price Art Museum, Monterey Park, CA; El Museo del Barrio,The Center for Craft, Asheville, NC; Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City, MX; and LACMA, Los Angeles, CA. Mayorga’s large-scale installation, Pilgrimage to the Isle of Pink, is on view for the next 25 years for the City of Chicago’s permanent public art collection at O’Hare International Airport’s Terminal 5.

Mayorga has been featured in Artforum, Artnet, Art in America, Art News, Cultured Magazine, DAZED, Galerie Magazine, Harper's Bazaar, Hyperallergic, Latina Magazine, Teen Vogue, The Guardian, The New York Times, Vogue, W Magazine, and Women’s Wear Daily. Her works are in the permanent collections of 21c Museum Hotels, Cerámica Suro, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, DePaul Art Museum, El Museo del Barrio, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and New Mexico State University Art Museum.