A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.
Headshot of Juarez Hawkins, an adult person with a dark skin tone, low haircut, and glasses, smiling.

On This Page

Juarez Hawkins

Lecturer

she/her

Contact

Bio

Juarez Hawkins is an artist, educator and curator. She received her B.A. from Northwestern University, and her M.A. in Interdisciplinary Arts from Columbia College Chicago. Juarez added clay to her wheelhouse in 2006, when she began teaching at Chicago State University. Studying under Marva Jolly, she found the malleability of the medium well-suited to her ideas around identity, spirituality, and the body. Juarez has exhibited widely, including exhibitions at Bridgeport Art Center, the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, and the South Side Community Art Center. She is a member of Sapphire and Crystals, a collective of African American female artists.

Her curatorial projects include Black Clay: A Survey of African American Ceramics and Luis De La Torre: Contemporary Codex at Chicago State’s President’s Gallery; Bill Walker: Urban Griot at the Hyde Park Art Center; Patric McCoy: Take My Picture at Wrightwood 659; and Irina Zadov: What Time Is It? at the Chicago Art Department.

Awards

Faculty Enrichment Grant, School of the Art Institute, 2023; SPARK Grant, Chicago Artists’ Coalition, 2020; Jury Awards, Black Creativity Exhibition, juried by Naomi Beckwith, 2012

Publications

"The Power of Creative Reclaim", ReSOURCE: Art and Resourcefulness in Black Chicago, Exhibition Catalogue; "Notes from a Daughter of the Wall", Bill Walker: Urban Griot, Exhibition Catalogue; "Curatorial Statement" and "Patric McCoy: Evolution of an Artist", Patric McCoy: Take My Picture, Exhibition Catalogue; Joanna Gardner-Huggett, "The Art of Flocking: Sapphire and Crystals, Education, Community Building and Collaboration", Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, fall 2021; Joanna Gardner-Huggett, "Chicago’s Sapphire & Crystals: Protest, Community, and Care during COVID", Art Journal, vol. 84, issue 1, 2025; Irina Zadov, "What Time Is It? A Cultural & Civic Archive: from Detroit to Palestine," Sixty Inches from Center, fall 2025

 

Exhibitions

Select Exhibitions (Curator): Irina Zadov: What Time Is It?, Chicago Art Department, 2023; Patric McCoy: Take My Picture, Wrightwood 659, 2023; Communal Spells, Chicago Park District, 2023; The Commons Project: Radical Futures, Museum of Contemporary Art, 2020; Intersectional Touch, Hyde Park Art Center, 2019; The Love Affair Continues, DuSable Museum, 2018-19; Bill Walker: Urban Griot, Hyde Park Art Center, 2017-18

Select Exhibitions (Artist): Black Women and Clay, Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, 2025; Agency: Craft in Chicago from the 1970s-80s and Beyond, Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, 2024; ReSOURCE: Art and Resourcefulness in Black Chicago, South Side Community Art Center, 2024; The Quiet is So Noisy, Zolla Lieberman Gallery, 2024; Sapphire & Crystals: Freedom’s Muse, Logan Center for the Arts, 2023; Sapphire & Crystals: Forward, Bridgeport Art Cener, 2021; Emergence, South Side Community Art Center, 2021; Instruct et Construct: Art Practice as Pedagogy, Union Street Gallery, Chicago Heights, IL, 2021; Well-Behaved Women, Lubeznik Center for the Arts, Michigan City, IN, 2020; The Dream Deferred, Blanc Gallery, 2020; Reflecting Dignity, Christopher Gallery, Prairie State College, 2020; Living with Art, Chicago Temple, 2020; Iconic Black Panther, Stony Island Arts Bank, 2018; Parkside National Small Print Exhibition, University of Wisconsin, 2017; Front and Center, Hyde Park Art Center, 2014

Personal Statement

My clay work is inspired by African ritual pottery. I am drawn to the rounded forms of Makonde (Tanzania) and Mangbetu (Congo), as well as Marva Jolly’s spherical story pots. I am also interested in Southern pottery, most notably face jugs. The ancestral beings I model in clay reach across space and time to tell stories of aging and resilience. Tribal markings made with urban cast-offs connect them to the present.

Collectively, these pieces combine to create spaces for new rituals, and in so doing, they create sites for sounding, movement, and healing.

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

This seminar is a direct application of the theory and conceptual framework for community-based art programming. Participants investigate new models for making art in the community, collaborating with a prearranged Chicago area audience, organization, and site. Collaborative art endeavors include indoor and outdoor site-specific work, installations, environments, performances, exhibitions, and special projects. Seminar sessions discuss and reflect the ethics, aesthetics, and challenges of 'public art' in community. Open to all graduate students.

Class Number

1108

Credits

3

Description

This course provides teacher candidates with opportunities to observe, analyze, teach, and evaluate in elementary and secondary settings. Teacher candidates build constructive relationships with K­12 students, faculty, staff, and community members at two fieldwork sites through guided observation engagement. They develop and teach curriculum projects and learn methods of non-punitive classroom management. This experience provides groundwork, connections, and continuity to apprentice teaching. Apprentice teachers will complete a 5-week elementary/middle school placement and a 5-week high school placement as well as attend a weekly apprentice teaching seminar at SAIC.

Students will study examples of curriculum and pedagogy that cover all Illinois state mandated standards as defined by the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE): NASAD Visual Arts Standards; Illinois Professional Teaching Standards; Social and Emotional Learning Standards; Literacy Standards. In the process, students will learn to create original art curriculum that encompasses these standards, and how to implement these standards in their pedagogical practice.

The course includes observation/teaching days at elementary and secondary school placements, as well as weekly seminars at SAIC. During each of their two 5-week placements, students spend the school day at their respective assigned school placements before attending the evening seminar at SAIC. Time in seminars is spent developing and critiquing curriculum projects, exemplars (teacher project samples), instructional materials and assessment strategies in preparation for teaching in practicum placement schools, and later in apprentice teaching.

Class Number

1992

Credits

3

Description

The Apprentice Teaching course continues learning experiences begun during practicum placements in the fall semester. This course provides licensure candidates with experience investigating significant, contemporary concepts and themes within a contemporary art and design context in elementary and secondary Chicago-area schools. Apprentice teachers will complete a 7-week elementary/middle school placement and a 7-week high school placement as well as attend a weekly apprentice teaching seminar at SAIC. Apprentice Teachers will be challenged to maintain high ideals of creative, critical, and relevant curriculum as they engage the complex realities of public school teaching.

Students will read a selection of texts that ground curricular theory within teaching practice. This will assist them in learning how to translate their curriculum development knowledge into pedagogy.

Apprentice teachers will plan, teach, assess their students¿ work, and evaluate the effectiveness of their lessons and teaching strategies. Apprentice Teachers will teach a culminating curriculum project, video-record their instruction of this project, and submit these videos along with written analysis to the nationally standardized, Illinois State Board of Education-mandated edTPA assessment.

Class Number

1871

Credits

12