October 21st & 22nd / 12-8pm

Featured Artist:

OMAR TELLO

ANATOLIY KHMARA

PATRICIA ACOSTA

CONNECTION TO PILSEN:

I fell in lovvvvve with Pilsen in the early 1990's while studying Spanish. I had just returned from spending close to a year in Mexico and Central America studying Latin America art, culture, language, and history. Bonding with an elderly Indigenous woman in the mountains of Chiapas changed my life forever. The experience with her and studying in the Yucatan reached deeply into my soul and shaped it like clay, forming an all encompassing compassion and mission for Latin American art, human rights and the environment. My father's years of Native American Studies also influenced my paradigm of reality from an early age.

I opened Colby Gallery on 18th Street between Ashland Avenue and Paulina Street in 2005 to show art that empowers the human spirit, promote local Pilsen artists, and brings national and international artists into the neighborhood for the local artists and community to experience. The mission of the gallery is to work with todays most passionate and inspirational contemporary artists and support them in creating new paradigms of the empowered human experience and potential. 

I bought my building and have made Pilsen my home. Over the years I have been involved in the arts community, served as a local school council representative at Cooper dual language academy for several years, was a founding member of GPEDA, participating in P.O.S. for most years, participated in many local groups, and became a godmother to a local Mexican family’s little boy, etc… I believe in people, especially artists, and the power we have together to create a better world, with more harmony and justice, than the one we have been given.