Ricardo Gonzalez , Position - Teaching Artist for SkyART since 2011

“My first memory of art is drawing. I was a child of the eighties so I would draw cartoons like Ghostbusters or Muppets, um… Muppet Babies or Popeye. So I would draw all of those things on any random sheet of paper. I remember, you know, using crayon and really coloring everything in. I was really into Popeye so I would always make these little cans of spinach- before I really knew how to spell spinach so I would just write random letters, and to me that would be the label.

My experience with SkyART goes back to 2011 and I remember working over at the other location, the South Chicago Art Center. I think just working in such an open space like SkyART, you have lots of staff, admin and people surrounding you so you definitely feel like you are working liv e there’s a lot of support and a lot of people coming and going working around you sooo it made it a little bit more exciting because there is a lot happening and you get new people everyday maybe one student would come in one day and not be there the next day so it also kind of helped me determine what’s interesting and what’s not so interesting. I have worked with a lot of different organizations and SkyART is the one that has helped me out the most because I have been able to test a lot of things and also scale back certain things and learn a lot from all the different age ranges.

Both locations have very much a kind of “Art Laboratory” feel to it so you are surrounded by all these cool art materials, you can actually get the table a little scruffy and really get to work on things and I really appreciate that because sometimes you don’t get that in other environments.”