Mobilize Creative Collaborative
The Mobilize Creative Collaborative is a collective led by four artists who utilize bicycle-based maker spaces to provide free creative workshops for youth and adults in public spaces: William Estrada’s Mobile Street Art Cart, Aquil Charlton’s Mobile Music Box, and Andrés Lemus-Spont and Marya Spont-Lemus’ FrankenToyMobile.
Mobilize Creative Collaborative
Formed in 2016, the Mobilize Creative Collaborative is a collective of four artists (Aquil Charlton, William Estrada, Andrés Lemus-Spont, Marya Spont-Lemus) who utilize bicycle-based makerspaces to provide free arts workshops for youth and adults in public places.
We see the Mobilize Creative Collaborative as a platform for intergenerational popular education, communal creation, and arts-based organizing within and across underinvested communities in which we live, work, and create on Chicago’s South and Southwest sides. By facilitating participants’ creative relationships with a place or a question that they care about, we might help them identify or articulate values, connect with family or neighbors through critical discussion and play, and experience joy in public space.
As a collective and through our individual projects, we have engaged thousands of people through events across Chicago—at parks, block parties, activist gatherings, back-to-school festivals, and online. We believe that communal creation is a community-building act with transformative potential, and that creating, rather than accepting what exists, can inspire belief in one’s agency. Our shared mission is part of a long-standing history in popular education that focuses on amplifying the work, knowledge, and power already present in historically marginalized communities.
Image: William Estrada and a child screenprint at an outdoor workshop as other people look on.
Mobile Street Art Cart
William Estrada’s Mobile Street Art Cart serves as a platform for community organizing and activism using artistic methods like self-designed stencils, stickers, and other text-based forms. The cart manifests William’s long-standing practice of developing community-based workshops that question power structures of race, economy, and cultural access.
Image: Aquil Charlton mixes sound while a young person speaks on the mic and another looks on.
The Mobile Music Box
Aquil Charlton’s Mobile Music Box is equal parts music class, instrument-making workshop, and street studio. It provides innovative, intuitive music education in neighborhoods with limited access to such programs.
Image: A group of youth and adults sew at the FrankenToyMobile, outside in an alley.
¡Anímate! Studio
Through ¡Anímate! Studio, Andrés Lemus-Spont and Marya Spont-Lemus guide participants in re-imagining and re-making existing objects and structures through open-ended, play-based experimentation in public space (e.g., the FrankenToyMobile). Their approach to creative re-framing is a hands-on exercise in critical pedagogy, prompting questions around values reflected in objects, the world around us, and our selves.