SANTIAGO X and Chicago Public Art Group are one of four winners of the 2021 Joyce Awards, which honor collaborations between artists of color and arts and community organizations throughout the Great Lakes region.
“Augment Earth connects past, present, and future concepts of indigeneity, memorializing Indigenous voices to combat the pervasive notions of white supremacy and colonialism manifested in the built environment,” said SANTIAGO
X. “The project leverages augmented reality to rewrite histories through an Indigenous lens and partake in radical visualization of a future that is more just.”
Chicago Public Art Group will commission multidisciplinary artist SANTIAGO X to create Augment Earth. An interactive digital art experience, Augment Earth brings a virtual element to 4000N, formerly known as the Northwest Portage Walking Museum (NWPWM), a conceptual museum trail connecting the Chicago and Des Plaines Rivers, that pays homage to the transportation crossroads of the Great Lakes and Mississippi River waterways used by residents for thousands of years. Using a smartphone app, visitors will be able to encounter an interactive digital gallery of Native histories, cultures, and languages, collected by and from Indigenous communities in Chicago as they traverse the trail. From augmented infographics hovering over Indigenous points of interest to three-dimensional models of pre-colonial constructed earthworks, Augment Earth will populate the walking experience via geolocation with rich narratives of Indigenous peoples.
SANTIAGO X is a multidisciplinary artist specializing in land, architectural, and new media installation. He is an enrolled citizen of the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana (Koasati) and Indigenous Chamoru from the Island of Guam U.S.A (Hacha'Maori). The artist has exhibited and designed internationally at institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Native Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; and Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria. He is a 2019 3Arts Award Winner, a 2020 New City Top 50 Artist, a member of the inaugural City of Chicago Monuments and Memorials Advisory Committee, and the first Native American contributor in the Chicago Architecture Biennial. SANTIAGO X has a Bachelors of Environmental Design from the University of Colorado, a Masters of Architecture from the University of Southern California, and a Masters of Fine Arts Studio in Art and Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Fellow 2021 awardees include: Sydney Chatman with Congo Square Theatre Company, Kameelah Janan Rasheed with FRONT International, and Daniel Minter with Lynden Sculpture Garden.