The Paris-based artist and film-maker Iván Argote’s new mobile sculpture, DIGNIDAD, launches in Chicago on 12 June. The artist is perhaps best known for Dinosaur (2024), an enormous, hyper-realistic pigeon sculpture he created for the High Line in New York.
Argote was born and raised in Bogotá. He studied art at the National University of Colombia, followed by Beaux-Arts de Paris. Years after earning his Master of Fine Arts degree, he remains in the French capital and now calls it home.
Argote’s new project was organised by the Floating Museum, an interdisciplinary Chicago-based art collective, as part of its Floating Monuments series. DIGNIDAD is installed atop a flatbed truck and will travel around the city. It begins its maiden voyage in Humboldt Park, a neighbourhood that includes its 207-acre namesake park—with a lagoon, boat house and formal gardens designed by the landscape architect Jens Jensen. The neighbourhood is where the Fiestas Patronales Puertorriqueñas take place every year; it is also the site of the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture.
Beginning in the mid-1950s, Humboldt Park’s main commercial corridor (Division Street) began developing into what is now the cultural heart of the Puerto Rican community (Paseo Boricua). The street is marked by two huge, red-and-blue steel flags that extend over the road at both ends of the business district.
Iván Argote Courtesy the artist
Argote began working on the commission two years ago, travelling to Chicago to meet with the Floating Museum and the project curator Carla Acevedo-Yates. Acevedo-Yates introduced Argote to the Latine communities in the city. Argote had visited Chicago before the Covid-19 pandemic and knew about the political history of Humboldt Park, in part from his upbringing. “My sister is a congresswoman [in Colombia], and my parents worked as unionists,” Argote tells The Art Newspaper. “I learned about the militancy of Chicago, and I feel good there.”
The Floating Museum held public meetings in the neighbourhood, where participants discussed the meaning and concept of monuments and Argote remembers someone asking him if he had ever seen “a monument offered to grandmothers”. At the time, the goal had been to finish the project in September. After spending time in Humboldt Park, Argote decided to complete it in time for the Puerto Rican Day Parade on 14 June. “DIGNIDAD is going to be the very first truck crossing the Paseo Boricua on Division Street,” he says.
The project will travel throughout the city, including the predominantly Mexican American communities of Pilsen and Little Village. Argote hopes it will also drive past the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in the suburb of Bridgeview. “The work asserts dignity as a shared condition,” he says.
After the start of the recent deportations sweeps, Argote found it a difficult and emotional experience to travel in the US. DIGNIDAD is a response to the political situation. Argote says he asked himself: “What if we take our dignity out and make a monument to that, and to our resilience.”
After its drive through Chicago, DIGNIDAD will travel to Dallas, Minneapolis and maybe even the East Coast.