THE MISSION

THE MISSION promotes art of the Americas, with a special interest in Latin American contemporary art

THE MISSION represents artists from the United States and Latin America, promoting an international dialogue through a diverse program of provocative solo exhibitions and group shows. Since 2010, THE MISSION has presented pioneering exhibitions of innovative contemporary and historical art, including numerous US debuts for influential artists from South America. Exploring distinctive cultural, soc

ial and historical contexts, THE MISSION advocates for artists that shape, inform and challenge contemporary art across media and genres. THE MISSION is dedicated to supporting artistic experimentation and forging new exchanges between artists and audiences throughout the Americas.

04/02/2026

Opening Tomorrow! Rodrigo Lara at Barely Fair 2026

THE MISSION PROJECTS is pleased to present new ceramic works by Chicago-based artist Rodrigo Lara at Barely Fair 2026, the 6th edition of the international miniature art fair. Operated by the Julius Caesar artist collective, the artist-run fair takes place near McKinley Park and is presented in a distinctive 1:12 scale format. Exhibitors share a tiny peek of their programming inside 20 x 20 inch booths, arranged in rows like a standard art fair. This year’s fair features day time general admittance and special evening events. Evening events include experimental cocktail installation called “Lewis Bag” by artist Tony Lewis.

Barely Fair is a ticketed event at a space near McKinley Park in Chicago. Venue address is provided through the ticketing platform upon booking visitation. Learn more at barelyfair.com.

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My work explores memory—how we build monuments not only from stone and clay, but from ritual, family history, and lived experience. I am interested in how we choose to remember, what we honor, and what gets left out of official histories.

I grew up near the Municipal Cemetery in Querétaro, Mexico, surrounded by tombs, religious art, and everyday acts of remembrance. These spaces felt active, filled with offerings and stories. As a child, I was both an altar boy and a conchero dancer, taking part in Catholic ceremonies and Indigenous rituals. Living between these traditions shaped how I understand identity, belief, and time.

My sculptures draw from these layered experiences. I combine references to family altars, colonial architecture, Indigenous ritual, and personal memories from Mexico and the United States. I work mainly with colored porcelain. It reminds me of the plasticine I used as a child—soft and direct. I shape forms that feel both intimate and symbolic.

The faces in my work come from memory—people I’ve observed, figures inspired by pre-Columbian sculpture, and Catholic imagery. They become imagined guardians and deities. Through clay, I reflect on how material holds memory and how we create new mythologies from the past.

Rodrigo Lara

10/29/2025

THE MISSION PROJECTS presents Natural Histories, an Artist Focus that assembles a collection of new and recent works by Anna Elise Johnson (Los Angeles, CA), Pablo Chiqui Garcia (Lima, Peru), and Matt Magee (Phoenix, AZ). Working across sculpture, painting, and assemblage, the artists investigate the Earth’s materials as both physical strata and conceptual frameworks, presenting a cross-disciplinary conversation that centers a shared interest in geology, Earth’s materials and composition, and the processes that have shaped the natural world over time.

Collection visits available by appointment. Email [email protected] to schedule.

04/22/2025

INSTALLATION VIEWS |
Jean Alexander Frater : Wee Restless Hours
Apr 5 - Jun 14 2025

Collection visits available by appointment. Email [email protected] to schedule.

Photos by Bob. (Robert Chase Heishman + Robert Salazar)

09/25/2024

INSTALLATION VIEWS |
Cosmic Balance: Works by Dorothy Hood
Sep 20 2024 - Feb 1 2025

Collection visits available by appointment. Email [email protected] to schedule.

09/18/2024

THE MISSION PROJECTS celebrates Chicago Exhibition Weekend with an exclusive open house tour of the collection of Sebastian Campos and Jennifer Andrade on Saturday, October 5 from 3-5pm.

The collection tour will include a special Artist Focus on Texas-born painter Dorothy Hood (1918 – 2000), organized in partnership with McClain Gallery (Houston, TX). One of the first American abstract surrealists, Hood is best known for her sprawling, large-scale paintings that merge abstraction and color field painting. This Artist Focus, entitled Cosmic Balance: Works by Dorothy Hood, will include paintings, collages, and drawings from the 1960s – 1990s that showcase Hood’s masterful use of color and her examination of physical and mental landscapes. From expansive paintings washed with intense hues to carefully arranged, intricate collages, the selection highlights Hood’s fascination with the cosmos, mysticism, science, spirituality, and outer space.

This event is RSVP only. Please RSVP to [email protected]. Location will be provided in a confirmation email. Space is limited.

09/06/2024

Cosmic Balance: Works by Dorothy Hood
Sep 20, 2024 – Feb 1, 2025

THE MISSION PROJECTS presents an Artist Focus on Texas-born painter Dorothy Hood (1918 – 2000), organized in partnership with McClain Gallery (Houston, TX). One of the first American abstract surrealists, Hood is best known for her sprawling, large-scale paintings that merge abstraction with color field painting. This Artist Focus, entitled Cosmic Balance: Works by Dorothy Hood, will include paintings, collages, and drawings from the 1960s – 1990s that showcase Hood’s masterful use of color and her consideration of physical and mental landscapes. From expansive, large-format paintings washed with intense hues to carefully arranged, intricate collages, the selection highlights Hood’s fascination with the cosmos, mysticism, science, spirituality, and outer space.

Dorothy Hood cultivated her artistic practice in Mexico City in the 1940s, an epicenter of profound cultural, political, and artistic transformation. She befriended and worked alongside exiled European artists and Latin American surrealists and married Bolivian composer José María Velasco Maidana. Upon returning to Houston with her husband in the 1960s, she began making massive paintings flooded with vivid color, marrying elements of Mexican surrealism and New York abstraction in a new and remarkable way. Striking and rich in emotion, Hood’s works explore and evoke the vast unknown of the universe, the cosmos, and the psyche. Cosmic Balance: Works by Dorothy Hood also presents a focused look at the artist’s collages, which she began making in 1982. While more modest in scale and recognition than her paintings, these works underscore Hood’s curious material experimentation and offer a more intimate view of her process.

DOROTHY HOOD (1918 - 2000) established herself as a pioneer of modernism from 1937, first at the Rhode Island School of Design, then at the Art Students League in New York City, before settling in Mexico City in the 1940s. In 1962, she returned to Houston and presented solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Witte Museum, San Antonio; Rice University, Houston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY. Her work is included in the permanent collections of several American museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Everson Museum, Syracuse, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; among many other institutions. In 2016, the Art Museum of South Texas (AMST), Corpus Christi, organized the first major retrospective of her works and published a monograph about her life and career entitled The Color of Being/El Color del Ser: DOROTHY HOOD (1918-2000). In 2018, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston presented a two-person exhibition entitled Kindred Spirits: Louise Nevelson & Dorothy Hood, mounting an unprecedented visual dialogue between the works of both artists.

Collection visits available by appointment. Email [email protected] to schedule.

Image:

Dorothy Hood
Shards of the Earth
c. 1980s
oil on canvas with collage elements
24.5 × 20.5 in
62.2 × 52.1 cm

04/22/2024

ON VIEW | Rodrigo Lara : Constructs
April 20 - June 1, 2024

THE MISSION PROJECTS is pleased to present Constructs, a solo show featuring new sculptures by Chicago-based artist Rodrigo Lara. The exhibition will include works created during his residency at Cerámica Suro.

As a Mexican immigrant in the United States, Lara’s work is informed by fragmented stories of memorialization, time, religion, ancestries, and his own experience of the endless process of becoming. Although classically trained in sculpture, he often eschews traditional ideologies and methods. His works are not always clean, finished, or beautiful. Instead, they break from these formal constructs. His sculptures, works on paper, and installations imagine a culture where portraiture and Catholic iconography are largely subsumed by indigenous visual languages, as well as other millennial religious artifacts and architecture from around the world.

Exhibition viewings by appointment. Email [email protected] to schedule.

Address

Lincoln Park
Chicago, IL
60614

Website

http://www.themissionprojects.com/

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