Making Light Together

Diana Solís does not seek out the limelight. She is a quiet Chicago icon who has been working as an artist, photojournalist, and community-based educator for almost half a century. Diana’s career and art have been bound up in community from the beginning: as a child, she saw her family and friends through the lens of a small Kodak. As a teaching artist with Casa Aztlan and an organizer with Mujeres Latinas en Acción, she documented and participated in Chicago’s queer, feminist, and Chicano movements throughout the seventies and eighties. It is this rooted foundation and her persistent commitment to remaining present in her communities that has carried her work in many forms across borders and through decades of galleries, classrooms, cafes, and collective spaces.

After studying with Kerry James Marshall at the University of Illinois Chicago in the nineties, Diana’s focus shifted to what would become a two-decade career in painting and illustration. It was toward the end of this time, in 2018, that the two of us met in a badly-lit boardroom of a small arts nonprofit. Diana’s investment in grassroots arts education helped set the stage for today’s field of teaching artistry, wherein professional artists come to education work through the transformative and intuitive aspects of an arts practice. What she began doing in the seventies has since developed into a field of work that is depended upon by almost every sector of the arts education field.

When we met, I was a newcomer to this work and to the city of Chicago. I didn’t know who I was meeting, the lineage I was becoming a part of, or the extent to which Diana and I would become entangled. Sitting down together, we were dissimilar in age and race as well as in our experiences of education, gender, and queerness. But we were two teaching artists who fell on different points along a common queer lineage. Along this vine we worked with young queer and trans Chicagoans to connect with generations of radical ancestors. We swam through stories of queer and trans artists, activists, and insurgents who fought for the same freer future we are still building; we shared stories of complicated lives that are often left to be found on one’s own, or deemed too inappropriate to invite into classrooms.

Through these years of teaching together, I came to know just how committed Diana really is to connection. First, through our coming together as colleagues to listen to each other, and then through holding space for students to join us as three living generations of queer and trans folks. We took prolonged time to connect with the stories and lives of our communities’ ancestors and reflect on our own constellational and intersecting experiences of queerness. In these schools I witnessed the effect Diana has on her students, tasking them not to listen to her but to themselves, not to seek out easier answers but to wonder about more difficult questions. In this muddy space of learning, our students connected to something they didn’t yet realize they were already a part of. Diana didn’t push them to it, but she welcomed them with the embrace of feeling fully seen, maybe for the first time.

In the collection of photographs  presented in this folio, I see the same commitment Diana brought to her classrooms. Whether a neighbor, a student, a colleague, or a friend, Diana wants to see you as wholly as you see yourself. Her portraits hold space for their subjects and allow them to belong exactly as they are, to be seen exactly how they want to be seen.

Diana has worked with the artist and scholar Nicole Marroquin to digitally archive her vast collection of photos that take place in bars and poetry events and apartments and home studios. These images are brought together for the first time in an exhibit at the Poetry Foundation, curated by Oscar Arriola and Marroquin. The photographs are records of these various spaces of intimacy where connection and community played out across poetry and art.

Today, portraiture remains a key aspect in Diana’s work. Her most recent photo essay, Luz: Seeing the Space Between Us, was published as a limited-edition artist’s book by Flatlands Press in November 2022. The project tracks her return to photography and a matured sense of place within her home community of Pilsen in the wake of 2020’s COVID isolation and lockdown. In my experience sitting for Diana, her camera unfurls a fertile ground where she can be present with whoever is in front of her. To be seen in such detail by another person, to not have to find your light, but to make it together—it’s hard to walk away and not feel impacted by the experience.

It’s a relief to witness somebody see so deeply at such close range. Working with Diana feels like stepping into the whirring aliveness of what it means to connect. Spread across a kitchen table of work samples and morsels of supper, rummaging in flat files of drawings and contacts sheets, napping on the couch after a long day, her aliveness stretches from every corner of her “casa studio” and pours from every image she makes with her camera. In the eye and art of Diana Solís, you come to know that community can grow from right where you are.