Image Credit: Clare Britt
Carlos Rolón’s The Division Street Riots returns to a pivotal moment in Chicago history, following the 1966 uprisings in Humboldt Park and extending through decades of research, reflection, and material exploration.
“I grew up with most of my family living in Humboldt Park in Chicago, where the story of the 1966 Division Street Riots resonates within the community to this day,” Rolón has shared.
Working across archival photographs, drawing, and printmaking, the series holds both personal memory and collective history. The works draw from fragments gathered over many years, shaped by conversations with residents and elders whose experiences have often remained outside dominant historical narratives.
“The artworks act as restitutive memorials,” as one writer observes, positioning the series not as reconstruction, but as a sustained act of remembrance.
Rolón’s process moves between image and intervention. Archival photographs are not presented as fixed documents, but as surfaces to be revisited, marked, and reinterpreted. Graphite and charcoal gestures move across these images, creating a tension between documentation and presence.
“Working primarily with graphite and charcoal allowed the drawings to function almost as acts of witnessing,” Rolón has noted.
Within the series, moments of stillness carry weight. Figures, interiors, and fragments of the built environment emerge and recede, suggesting both presence and absence, memory and erasure.
“As the uneasy truce settled over the community… the game of who to blame surfaced,” reflecting the unresolved tensions that continue to shape how this history is remembered.
Rolón does not attempt to resolve a singular narrative. Instead, the work remains open, allowing histories to be held in their complexity. What began as an engagement with archival material has evolved into a sustained inquiry into how memory is carried forward and who is included within it.
A selection of works from The Division Street Riots is currently presented in Chicago. Additional context can be found through recent coverage in The Art Newspaper and Newcity Art.
