Victor Montañez addressed an audience on Sept. 15 at El Centro to accompany the unveiling of a collaborative mural that he oversaw entitled “Sophia in Society.”
Montañez spent his summer creating the mural alongside students of El Centro’s Summer Transition Program in the hopes that incoming Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU) students embrace art from the ground up in order to better thrive academically.
In his speech, Montañez said that a university curriculum “devoid of the cultural richness and intellectual value that art offers is, simply put, a poor education.”
Maria Luna-Duarte, assistant director of El Centro, described the artwork as being “agricultural” in concept in that the students “started with a seed, opened up the ground, planted the seed, and encouraged it to grow.” She explained that the work was created in a process beginning with the students splashing canvases with paint while stating three ambitions and how to go about achieving them.
After the initial underpainting, the students were asked to come up with concepts based on their stated goals. They came up with the power of women, which they with women simultaneously holding babies in the womb while holding up the world.
Among the main concerns that the students hoped to show is the balance between education and motherhood. Luna-Duarte said that the painting’s sun and moon stand for motherhood, and that the plant represents the growth that they hope education affords them.
Montañez said that the program’s artwork was made with “one ambitious three part goal: to create artworks that unmistakably reflected our great pride in our heritage and history, addressed our commitment to our personal and academic goals, and manifested our politics of community empowerment and self-determination.”
El Centro’s Summer Transition Program is aimed at CPS students who are planning on enrolling as first-time freshmen in the fall. Upon completion of the voluntary program, they are awarded a 6-credit scholarship. This year participants had a 100 percent completion rate, which was in no doubt due partly to Montañez’s project. Nearly all of the students involved went on to enroll at one of NEIU’s campuses this fall.
As for the students’ artistic goal of community involvement and self-determination, Montañez said that their success is “undebatable,” and that they “met and exceeded all expectations in that area”. If NEIU enrollment from the Summer Transition Program is, in fact, directly correlated to the project, then Montañez has the numbers to prove his success.