Info
Miguel Limón (b. Chicago, Illinois) is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and cultural worker whose practice spans printmaking, photography, installation, and socially engaged pedagogy. Informed by a lineage of Mexican migrant labor and shaped by their background in museum studies and education, Limón explores the ways images, objects, and materials function as carriers of memory and spirit. Their work approaches the print as both artifact and animate form—an object that not only documents but intervenes, activating personal and collective histories.
Miguel has taught and led programs at the University of Chicago, SAIC @ Homan Square, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and more. They hold a BS in Education from DePaul University and an MA in Museum and Exhibition Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Their work has been exhibited at Mana Contemporary, the Design Museum of Chicago, the John David Mooney Foundation, and others.
Their work has received grant awards from 3Arts/Ignite, the Aperture Foundation, and the Puffin Foundation. Limon was named as a “2025 Artist to Watch” by Comfort Station, and 2024 Visual Arts Fellowship Honorable Mention by Luminarts Foundation. They have been featured in Vogue Italia, V Magazine, Aperture, Sixty Inches from Center, and Local Wolves.
Statement of Praxis
My praxis is rooted in the belief that learning is a generative, liberatory, and co-constructed process that lives between the body, the spirit, the object, and the world. As both artist and educator, I resist the binary between knowing and not-knowing, teacher and student, archive and experience. I draw from Jorge Lucero’s artist as teacher, teacher as artist framework to embrace the pedagogical act as an aesthetic one - teaching as material, curriculum as composition, and meaning-making as a relational and time-based practice.
I am guided by a phenomenological understanding that knowledge is never neutral or abstract; it is lived, embodied, and situated. Objects, like people, hold memory and spirit. Their meanings are not static but emerge in relationship, through encounter. As an educator and cultural worker, I ask: how do we approach the object not as something to consume or master, but to witness, to hold, to be transformed by? My pedagogy stages these questions through participatory engagement, critical reflection, and a respect for the opacity and resistance of what we do not fully know.
Drawing on Vygotsky’s theory of proximal development, I see learning as emergent in the space between individuals: a social act made possible through guidance, risk, and collaboration. At the same time, I center Paulo Freire’s conscientization: that to educate is to reveal the conditions of our world and empower one another to transform them. Knowledge is not extracted, it is built. bell hooks’ theory of radical love teaches me that this process must be grounded in care, accountability, and deep respect for each learner’s complexity and agency.
I am guided by a phenomenological understanding that knowledge is never neutral or abstract; it is lived, embodied, and situated. Objects, like people, hold memory and spirit. Their meanings are not static but emerge in relationship, through encounter. As an educator and cultural worker, I ask: how do we approach the object not as something to consume or master, but to witness, to hold, to be transformed by? My pedagogy stages these questions through participatory engagement, critical reflection, and a respect for the opacity and resistance of what we do not fully know.
Drawing on Vygotsky’s theory of proximal development, I see learning as emergent in the space between individuals: a social act made possible through guidance, risk, and collaboration. At the same time, I center Paulo Freire’s conscientization: that to educate is to reveal the conditions of our world and empower one another to transform them. Knowledge is not extracted, it is built. bell hooks’ theory of radical love teaches me that this process must be grounded in care, accountability, and deep respect for each learner’s complexity and agency.
My work is particularly attuned to what Anzaldúa calls the borderlands — the transitory, shifting spaces between categories, disciplines, and identities. To me, these spaces are pedagogical: they are where conflict, contradiction, and hybridity produce new ways of being. In institutional settings, I work to hold open these spaces, challenging the hierarchies of schooling and the extractive logics of museum education. I align with Ivan Illich’s call to deschool society in the redistributions of knowledge production and learning, beyond the credentialed expert, the curated label, or the closed archive. Institutions of meaning (like academia or musums) are simply organized communities of people, I argue that the “lay man” can participate in these actions of meaning-making, too.
Education, like memory, is not a linear path but an adapting, a return, a rupture, a revealing. My role is to guide others in that movement, to build with them a pedagogy that is grounded in justice, spirit, and the refusal to forget.
Education, like memory, is not a linear path but an adapting, a return, a rupture, a revealing. My role is to guide others in that movement, to build with them a pedagogy that is grounded in justice, spirit, and the refusal to forget.
Artist Statement
My practice explores the intersection of image-making , social practice, and historical memory to reclaim narratives of migration, labor, and cultural resistance. Grounded in the traditions of printmaking and photography, my work activates archives to challenge dominant historical narratives. By employing risograph printing, screenprinting, and site-responsive interventions, I translate collective memory into tactile, participatory experiences.
Raised on Chicago’s Southeast Side, I am deeply invested in the ways industrial histories shape cultural identity and environmental justice. Using rust-based inks, carbon prints, and fabric installations, I reimagine the material residue of industry as a carrier for storytelling. At its core, my work is a practice of radical archiving - activating memory to ensure that histories of displacement, labor, and resistance remain visible. I aim to foster connections between past and present struggles, building bridges between art, activism, and the lived experiences of working-class communities.
Raised on Chicago’s Southeast Side, I am deeply invested in the ways industrial histories shape cultural identity and environmental justice. Using rust-based inks, carbon prints, and fabric installations, I reimagine the material residue of industry as a carrier for storytelling. At its core, my work is a practice of radical archiving - activating memory to ensure that histories of displacement, labor, and resistance remain visible. I aim to foster connections between past and present struggles, building bridges between art, activism, and the lived experiences of working-class communities.
Beyond the studio, I explore knowledge production in informal cultural spaces like museums, libraries, and community centers. Inspired by bell hooks and Paulo Freire, I view art as a site of social transformation, using creative intervention as a democratic medium for collaboration, mentorship, and accessibility. Through participatory workshops, zines, and site-specific activations, I create spaces for collective reflection and action. Bridging historical research, material experimentation, and community engagement, my social practice work dissolves the boundaries between art and lived experience.
Whether through formal works or interpersonal exchange, I wish to honor to past while imagining a more just future.
Whether through formal works or interpersonal exchange, I wish to honor to past while imagining a more just future.
Curriculum Vitae