Joseph Mora / 19.5638°N, 100.2969°W – 41.8781°N, 87.6298°W (Chicago)
19.5638°N, 100.2969°W – 41.8781°N, 87.6298°W (2021) by artist Joseph Josué Mora
Joseph Josué Mora is a multidisciplinary artist, art preparator and educator. He is Mexican-born and based in Chicago. Mora’s work focuses on portraying and understanding his reality as a DACA-mented immigrant living in the United States. Through his politicized identity he questions immigration, disenfranchisement, and work ethic in his practice.
Currently Mora’s work centers on using art handling materials and cues, to mirror issues of immigration that parallel the lack of equity between the art world and bureaucratic world.
The artwork (19.5638°N, 100.2969°W – 41.8781°N, 87.6298°W) references how in Mexican-American culture Monarch butterflies are used as a motif to represent undocumented people who have made the journey from Mexico to the United States.
Recreating a design made by Monarch butterflies’ migration path, this project brings forth ideas about how humans are the only species with federal laws that dictate how we migrate—
though as humans, we are also the cause of altering animals’ migration phenomena and life spans.
BIO: Joseph Josué Mora’s first solo show took place in 2015 at Pilsen Outpost. In 2016 he participated in the Chicago Latinx Art Now Biennial. Mora has performed a collaborative performance at Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago, and exhibited a collaborative work in the group exhibition, Peeling Off the Grey at the National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago. Mora’s past artist residencies include the CORE Residency Program at the Chicago Art Department, where he debuted a series of new and ongoing work; and Yollocalli Arts Reach at Barrett Park, through the Chicago Park District’s Arts Partners in Residence Program from 2018 through 2021. Mora is currently a gallery technician at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he mentors student workers and consults on installing artwork on campus.
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