Current Exhibition

We’re Not All Here / No Estamos Todes is a transnational archive of absence. Artist Soledad Muñoz weaves stories of loss and resistance across different geographies together with copper wire and cotton thread. Her exhibit–which includes a series of interactive woven portraits, a sound installation, a film projection, and interactive maps documenting missing and murdered Black and Latina women and girls–explores the human costs of state violence and abandonment, from Chile to Palestine to the state of Illinois.

In her textile portraits, Muñoz interrogates different facets of attempted erasure, including the murders of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and Palestinian surgeon and administrator Dr. Adnan al-Bursh; the suspicious disappearances of Chilean environmental activist Julia Chuñil and Black, trans woman from Chicago Taylor Casey; and the detention and deportation of Chicago immigrant-solidarity organizer Gladis Yolanda Chavez Pineda, all of which left their communities to contend with their absence.

This compelling solo exhibition pulls on the conceptual threads that connect Muñoz’s previous work on Pinochet-era detenidos desaparecidos, or disappeared detainees, in Chile who opposed the dictatorship, with the Social Justice Initiative’s artistic explorations of collective loss in prior exhibitions that focused on the cases of the 43 kidnapped students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in Mexico, and the murder of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and its aftermath. It is particularly urgent in this current time of genocide, repression, and dehumanization to learn from different ways people can respond when the fabric of communities is torn apart.

While each instance of disappearance occurs in its unique context, Muñoz’s work gestures toward a set of common tactics and logic underpinning acts of state violence and exclusion from the protection of the law. Viewed another way, this body of work also concerns itself with how different communities mobilize to mend, remember, and conceptualize justice in the aftermath of immense loss.

We hope you’ll join us.

January & February open gallery hours:

• Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays: noon to 4:00 PM

The gallery will be closed:

• January 23, due to extreme weather
• February 19

Please check back for updates.

Soledad Fátima Muñoz is a Canadian-Chilean artist and researcher whose practice centers on the political and historical dimensions of textiles. Raised in Rancagua, Chile, she creates large-scale weavings—often made with copper wire—that explore memory, resistance, and material storytelling. Muñoz holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from Emily Carr University. She has received several awards, including the City of Vancouver Emerging Artist Award, the New Artists Society Merit Scholarship, and the Textile Society of America’s Student Award.

Woven artworks for this exhibit were created at LMRM (Loom Room) in Chicago.

Studio: LMRM

Team: Hope Wang and Tali Halpern

SJI is also grateful for our curator Lola Ayisha Ogbara.