Somos Arte began out of a desire to showcase Art during the 2018 Puerto Rican festival of Chicago. Our communities long standing annual festival held in Humboldt Park highlighted music, culture and food, but had room to elevate the many talented Puerto Rican artist in our city.
Our beginnings were humble but powerful. Each artist we asked to participate said yes immediately, speaking to the need for a space for artist in our neighborhood. To start to gather community for the following year, we held a fundraiser in support of Hurricane Maria and Earthquake relief, bringing together over 30 artist with 40 pieces and 10 small business partners who donated raffle items. We raised over $4,500 that night and solidified our desire to continue serving culture and community.
We took on various community projects until the pandemic mostly halted our efforts. That was until we partnered with Paint the City for their ‘Boards of Change Campaign” harnessing the movement launched by the spotlight show on police brutality across our nation. Somos Arte was brought in to extended the project to Humboldt Park connecting local artist and small businesses wanting support through the board up project.
Through this project, we started to harness the power of collaboration within and beyond our Puerto Rican community. We connected with local artist of various backgrounds. We realized the need to highlight more women in the Chicago art scene. This led us to change our mission to “celebrating community through art and education” because we center the celebration of our various communities no matter where we are.
We’ve expanded to spaces across the city from Navy Pier to Pilsen and all the way down to Pullman Park with DCase for the taste of Chicago neighborhood edition. These opportunities have been wonderful and we hope to continue to grow, but we find such comfort and joy coming back to Humboldt Park as home. In fact, our connection and love of our community here in Humboldt Park is what connected us to Chicago Comm Safety for the 2022 Low Key Kickback for teens and the Taste of Chicago neighborhood edition in Humboldt Park.
Everything we do is with the ultimate goal of elevating our community here in Humboldt Park. We entered an official partnership with Humboldt Park this year solidifying our relationship as community partners. Recently, we produced ‘Books and Backpacks’ our annual community supply drive and back to school fair. Books and Backpacks has grown year after year with the support of artist, local businesses, non profit partners, volunteers and more. We aim to serve at least 300 students each year through supply give aways, but also providing a space to celebrate the start of the school year. We provide a variety of art workshops, an interactive community mural, photobooth with a background created and designed by teens from our street art class, abuelita story time, and more. While the supplies are integral to the successful start of the school year, so is the mindset and feeling that education is important and valued in your community. We collect contact information from our families and provide them resources from community partners year round. We celebrate care givers through items like “Mami Bags” or giving flowers to families. Our event is about cultivating community and by year 4, we know we’ve done an amazing job of that.
We’re seeking support. to build within our community, elevating not only Books and Backpacks as we celebrate it’s 5th year, but bringing to life a series of summer events leading up to the big day. We plan to tap into our network of local artist to bring in even more workshops and experiences for families. We plan to hire folks within our community who value events like ours and can help us continue to build our network celebrating art and education. We learned through our various events such as the previous mentioned Hurricane Maria fundraiser as well as our annual For the Love of Art fundraiser that our community values being uplifted and celebrated in so many ways. Our plan is to dedicate each event to different members of our community from local teachers, families, teens and more. This will ensure we continue to create welcoming spaces while also serving a variety of members within Humboldt Park.
Our neighborhood is drastically changing everyday and as community members committed to connection, we understand the need to support and care for our long standing families, while welcoming in newcomers to help every understand how to navigate change. Our proven track record of entering new spaces and providing services with joy and care, will help us continue to provide the same joy and care while protecting the cultural and political history of our neighborhood and families.
For more information about the work of Somos Arte, please check out our website, Somos Arte Chicago. Com and our Instagram @somosarteChicago
