'The Subject Demanded A More Restrained Approach': Carlos Rolón On Revisiting The 1966 Uprising In Chicago's Humboldt Park The Art Newspaper International Art News And Events

At 65Grand, Chicago multimedia artist Carlos Rolón is revisiting one of the city's most consequential Puerto Rican histories. The Division Street Riots centers on the 1966 unrest in Humboldt Park, which erupted the day after Chicago's first Puerto Rican Day Parade and followed the police shooting of 20-year-old Arcelis Cruz. The fighting lasted three days, but the event's place in the city's wider historical record has remained limited.

Rolón, who was born in Chicago in 1970 to Puerto Rican parents and now lives in Humboldt Park, has spent much of his career exploring Puerto Rican culture, identity, and diaspora. For years he worked under the name Dzine, building exuberant installations and richly colored works often accented with Swarovski crystals, mirrors, and gold. That visual language is still part of his practice, but this exhibition moves in a different direction.

Here, Rolón relies on graphite, charcoal, and black-and-white imagery to create a more restrained atmosphere. The works draw on archival photographs and newspaper articles, and several pieces crop and enlarge small details from historic images, encouraging viewers to notice what might otherwise be overlooked. The effect is less theatrical than forensic: a form of looking that feels attentive, deliberate, and historically grounded.

The exhibition also includes Humboldt Park Bicycle, extending Rolón's interest in sculpture and the objects that carry cultural memory. In conversation about the show, he described the project as shaped by both personal proximity and historical responsibility. That dual impulse runs through the installation, which treats the uprising not as distant subject matter but as a lived community history.

Rolón's earlier work offers a striking contrast. His 2007 piece Pimp Juice, a customized cherry-red, white-topped 1993 Cadillac Fleetwood lowrider with 14 speakers, five video screens, and 24-carat gold hydraulics, drew attention at Art Basel Miami Beach for its spectacle and excess. The new exhibition is far more subdued, but no less assertive.

Rolón also connects the project to Puerto Rican domestic architecture, especially wrought-iron gates, or rejas, which he sees as both protective and decorative. In that tension between public and private, ornament and barrier, the exhibition finds one of its most resonant ideas. The result is a show that links Chicago history, Puerto Rican memory, and the visual language of survival with unusual clarity.

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