This exhibition represented a five-month collaboration between the Loyola University Museum of Art (LUMA) and Saint Joseph Services Community Center. The center provides outreach services in Humboldt Park for immigrant and inner-city families giving them access to after-school programs, computer labs, spirituality programs, and English as a Second Language classes.

Every Wednesday afternoon from January to June, Curator of Education Ann Meehan, Master Teacher Susan Friel, and Education Assistant Chloe Lundgren worked with Latino youth ages 8 to 14 on three projects.

Students visited LUMA to see the Martin D’Arcy, S.J. Collection. Here, they viewed the Russian icons and the stained glass from the Canterbury Cathedral. Two art projects developed from this visit: First, icons in which students had to depict someone they admired and second, stained glass windows made with acetate and permanent markers.

For the final project, students took inspiration from Russian artist Marc Chagall after visiting Graven Images: Marc Chagall’s Bible Illustrations on view at LUMA. They created a series of prints that depicted themselves in motion. We have included the inked printing plates and the prints so that viewers may get a sense of the artistic process.

We would like to thank Melanie Mottinger and Wade Ekstrom from Saint Joseph Services for their tremendous help with these projects.

This program was generously underwritten by a grant from the Kinder Morgan Foundation.

Image: Hannah Maxcy (left) and Peter Comfort (right), 2nd grade