By Toi Cross –

Her work makes you sit back, analyze, and think about the message. Whether it’s a performance piece, a sculpture, mural, or another form of public art, 28-year-old inter-disciplinary artist, Maria Gaspar has a story to tell. Through her artistry, the world as she experiences it, is shared with anyone willing to look, listen, and interpret—even if you don’t like or agree with it.

“It’s like I’m going to do what I want and it’s for you to deal with, tackle, resist, enjoy. That’s what art is about, I think, to create dialogue and to expose problems and issues. I’m not going to hold back,” she said.

After class, she sits in Artopolis Café and Bakery near the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC)Campus, where she is also a graduate student, joined by her friend of the same name. She’s dressed in a knitted hat with her brown shoulder-length hair feathered and exposed underneath. She wears a white tank top and a skirt that flows over her knees under a burnt-orange colored jacket and a blue and white printed scarf tied around her neck.

Photo by Luis Soto

As an inter-disciplinary artist, Gaspar is able to work in a variety of media. This ranges from video, painting, sculpting, to performance art and most recently, writing. Her work reflects cultural identity and body politics.

Body politics is a subject that looks at the representation of the ethnic or gender demographics of a region, she explained. With Gaspar’s work, she looks at the Latina community as well as all brown bodies and questions thoughts of shame along with exposing issues women face when it comes to the naked body.

She does this in hopes of creating a past or history for not only herself but for those who silently ask the question: “Why get naked? Well, why not? Why should there be any shame when it comes to the naked body?”

“I come from a very traditional Mexican family and we, (women), would never get undressed in front of each other and I’ve always questioned that,” she said.

Theaster Gates, a friend and colleague of Gaspar, describes her work as “complicated.”

“It both seeks to make clear where it comes from, but complicates it in the most honest ways. As soon as you think you have it figured out, the equation is still slightly incongruous,” he said.

Born and raised in Chicago on 26th street in Little Village in Chicago, Gaspar was the fourth child born to her immigrant parents from Mexico.

She was always around her mother who worked as a clown around and near Pilsen. It was the push from her mother towards the arts that pulled her away from the traditional working-class job.

“Whether it was performing with her, doing ballet, jazz, or tap, it’s really her doing. She kind of supported me,” she said. “A lot of the work deals with issues of identification, representation, culture spectacle, the idea of loss, yearning, and the brown body, which has been informed from my past with my mom’s clowning and dancing. All that has been a part of my current practice,” said Gaspar.

She went to Whitney Young Magnet High School where teachers encouraged her in the arts.
At age 14, she began painting murals under the guidance and mentorship of fellow artist and educator Olivia Gude, who runs the Spiral Workshop at UIC and is a part of the Chicago Public Art Group. Gaspar is now a member as well. During this time, Gaspar’s eagerness to learn and expand on her skill grew.

“She came in very self-confident, very articulate and thoughtful,” Gude said. “Very much already seeing herself not stuck in some classroom as a consumer of culture but as someone who was going to be a maker of culture.”

Under Gude’s guidance at the Spiral Workshop, which is a program dedicated to encouraging youth to explore contemporary art and to develop art-making and critical thinking skills, Gaspar was challenged to look into the depths of art and form an understanding of its concepts.

“I already had a support system. Not only my teachers but community people from Pilsen that were artists, people like Olivia, active, working, professional artists that were making a living. They were doing it and that’s why I think I knew it was possible for me to do it. And they were living just fine. I was like I want to be like them!” she said with emotions piercing through her eyes.

Her involvement with the Chicago Public Art Group enables her to showcase her artwork throughout the city as well as organize community events.  In 2003, Gaspar assisted artists from CPAG with painting a mural on the Western-Douglas CTA Blue Line stop.

Two years later she began leading projects with the Group and organizing her own events. This led to mosaic murals and other permanent works being showcased at the Garfield Conservatory Park, Marwen Foundation, along with heading community projects around her Little Village neighborhood.

“I don’t think my mom knew how serious I was going to take art. I think she just thought that it was a hobby and it would just interest me as being fun. My mom really encouraged me to be a stewardess. That seemed reasonable to her,” Gaspar shared.

She explains the lack of understanding her family had when learning of her dreams to attend college and major in art. She makes note that in the 1980s graduating and going to college wasn’t something common in her community. Coming from a traditional Latino family, the mindset is usually work, work, and work.

“I think that as working class immigrant parents, it’s challenging to understand the value of money and work and then see your kid going into an arena that’s so unstable and underappreciated,” she said.

For as long as she remembered, there was this fascination that she developed with New York City. In high school she met a representative from Pratt Institute, School of Art & Design in New York.

Gaspar somehow convinced her mother and sister to join her on her trip to visit the school’s open house. She and her family enjoyed New York City for about two weeks Gaspar knew that she was where she needed to be.

“NYC in itself was really my art education. I mean the school was one part of it but the city was really the main part of it. For me, a young woman from a place like 26th street in Chicago, to go to NYC to a pretty good art school, it was just major for me and my development as a young person, young woman, and as an artist. It was overwhelming,” Gaspar said.

Returning to Chicago allowed a deeper education and desire for the arts and combining the two art worlds—New York and Chicago—to make for a better understanding of culture and contemporary art.

Gude said Gaspar has made scholastic and artistic achievements.

“She developed herself as an artist with a very cosmopolitan sensibility. She draws off traditional rhetoric elements of Mexican- culture and combines it with avant-garde sensibility because it combines with contemporary art,” Gude said.

Today, Gaspar spreads herself between, graduate courses at UIC, performing and showcasing her art work, teaching drama to children at a school in her community, and creating events for the Chicago Public Art Group. Her encounters within the realms of life have inspired her to create and challenge the mind.

“I feel like it all comes back to you as an artist,” she said.  Everything that you’ve experienced, it all follows you and resurfaces in different ways.”

For her, the past, present, and future resurface with each piece of art.

“I have rarely found a person so committed to traversing the challenging spheres of the art world and the world of her youth,” Gates said. “Maria has so much to offer the contemporary art scene and her contributions as a teacher and thinker, while already mature, will continue to be a gift to all who hear her share candidly. A true Chicago gift, that Maria.”’