About Us.
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. The MCC acts as an intergenerational platform for popular education, communal creation, and arts-based organizing within and across 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 these communities.
Projects by MCC Artists
Image caption: Teens and adults creating at William Estrada’s Mobile Street Art Cart, outdoors at Kennicott Park.
Image description/alt-text: Five participants stand around the Mobile Street Art Cart, three looking down as they draw or write with paint pens on tote bags, and two looking at each other, in conversation. At least three wear a blue shirt with an illustration of a cassette on it that reads “Mixtape Live!” in all caps. In the foreground, a screen shows the use of orange paint. In the background, there are cars, residences, and a sign reading “Kennicott Park.”
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 caption: Mobile Music Box founder, Aquil Charlton, making vinyl tune saxophones with a group of children at Jardincito Nature Play Garden in Little Village.
Image credit: Courtesy of the artist.
Image description/alt-text: The photo shows an adult male with a roll of vinyl tube on his lap, sitting with three small boys on a large rock in a community garden. All of the people in the photo are engaged in making instruments from the tubing.
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 caption: ¡Anímate! Studio’s FrankenToyMobile project. Marya Spont-Lemus facilitates a workshop in Greater Grand Crossing, surrounded by several youth participants.
Image credit: Photo by Becca Waterloo.
Image description/alt-text: The photo shows several people, most visible from the shoulders down, standing around a tabletop that is covered in toy parts and other items. It appears that the adult is white and the youth are Black. All are creating toys and most are holding scissors.
¡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.
Meet the MCC Team
Andrés Lemus-Spont (he/him) | Designer, Educator, and Fabricator
Andrés Lemus-Spont (he/him) is a designer, educator, fabricator, and proud child of Mexican immigrants, who is based on Chicago’s southwest side. He teaches art and architecture in various in-school and afterschool programs for youth from kindergarten through high school, and studied architecture at College of DuPage and Illinois Institute of Technology. Andrés believes strongly in the value of mentoring and does so formally through Big Brothers Big Sisters and informally through apprenticeships for college and early-career designers. Andrés founded and directs Building Brown Workshop, a design and fabrication studio serving artists, architects, and communities. With Marya Spont-Lemus, Andrés co-founded ¡Anímate! Studio, a shared community arts practice that is a vehicle for playful, intergenerational creative workshops centered around joy and criticality in public space. From 2015-2019 that work took the form of the FrankenToyMobile. Andrés is a founding member of the Mobilize Creative Collaborative.
IG | @a.lemusspont, @aniimate_studio, @building_brown_workshop Website | http://www.animatestudio.org
Photo by Sasha Arutyunova
Aquil Charlton (he/him) | Music Producer. Maker. Multimedia & Participatory Artist.
Founder of the Mobile Music Box and founding member of Mobilize Creative Collaborative, Aquil “AQ” Charlton (he/him pronouns) uses imagination, music, and making to engage people and communities in play. Rooted in hip hop and black rhythmic traditions, the dynamically talented AQ is a block party in the flesh: He can rap while programming beats and improvise a hook with the audience as they play along on instruments they made together by hand. Aquil is an accomplished performer, DJ, and producer who has participated in tours, cultural exchanges, and residencies as far from home as Pakistan and Moscow. He uses analog electronics, synths, samples, and natural recordings to create otherworldly environments and simple grooves for his witty, cerebral songwriting. He also performs live improvisations and collaborates with other musicians and visual artists to create immersive experiences. A Kenwood, Chicago resident, Aquil is a teaching artist in his community and father to a young son.
IG | @mobilemusicbox or @mraquil
Image caption: Marya Spont-Lemus.
Image credit: Photo by Gaby FeBland.
Image description/alt-text: The photo shows Marya Spont-Lemus from the chest up and smiling slightly. Spont-Lemus, a white person, is wearing pink glasses and a yellow sweater and has an asymmetrical haircut. She appears against a brick background.
Marya Spont-Lemus (she/her) | Writer, Interdisciplinary Artist, Informal Educator
Marya Spont-Lemus (she/her) writes fiction and personal narratives, critically re-makes objects, and educates/facilitates/collaborates, often in public spaces. Marya co-created the FrankenToyMobile (an ¡Anímate! Studio project) and co-founded the MCC. She works as a teaching artist, interviews for Sixty Inches From Center, and was part of the ensemble that devised and performed Free Street Theater’s “Still/Here: Manifesting Joy and Survival.” Marya is a white U.S. American of Polish, Irish, and Swedish descent. She has a BA in Cinema and Media Studies (University of Chicago) and an MA in Art Education (Community track; University of Texas-Austin). Trainings through Chicago Freedom School, among other experiences, have significantly informed her ongoing work toward building a more just society, an intentionally anti-oppressive practice, and a less harmful life. An 11-year resident of McKinley Park, Marya is active locally through Neighbors for Environmental Justice, Chicago Community Jail Support, and other efforts.
Website | http://www.animatestudio.org or www.maryaspontlemus.com
Photo by Sasha Arutyunova
William Estrada (he/him) | Multidisciplinary Artist + Educator
William Estrada is an arts educator and multidisciplinary artist. His art and teaching are a collaborative discourse that critically re-examines public and private spaces with people to engage in radical imagination. He has presented in various panels regarding community programming, arts integration, and social justice curricula. He is currently a Teaching Artist at Telpochcalli Elementary and faculty at the School of Art and Art History at UIC. William is engaging in collaborative work with the Mobilize Creative Collaborative, Chicago ACT Collective, and Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative. His current research is focused on developing community based and culturally relevant projects that center power structures of race, economy, and cultural access in contested spaces that provide a space to collectively imagine just futures.
IG | @werdmvmnt FB | facebook.com/werdmvmnt Website | https://werdmvmntstudios.com
Image caption: Simone Reynolds facilitating a Guest Artist workshop with the Mobilize Creative Collaborative, August 2019. Image credit: Photo by Marya Spont-Lemus Image description/alt-text: There are nine people, some standing and some sitting, gathered around a table covered in paper and art supplies. Simone is guiding young people through a poetry zine workshop. Each attendee is decorating their zine with the following: pencils, markers, and tape.
Image caption: A video still of participants screen-printing their own “Justice” posters at William Estrada’s Mobile Street Art Cart, during a Mobilize Creative Collaborative event done in partnership with Neighbors for Environmental Justice (McKinley Park, 2018). Image credit: Image from a video by Scrappers Film Group. Image description/alt-text: The image’s foreground shows several screen-printed “JUSTICE” posters that are clothes-pinned to a string, drying. Fuzzy and scattered in the background are participants of multiple ages, standing around multiple outdoor art-making stations.
Image caption: A Mobilize Creative Collaborative workshop
Follow us on Instagram - @mobilize_creative
Support Us!
In support of 2021’s “Mobilize! Creative Blocks, Collective Dreams” project, we are very excited to have received an Artist Response Program grant ($100,000) from the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, as well as grants from Crossroads Fund, Friends of the Parks, and GoFundMe.org’s Save the Environment Fund. These grants, along with generosity in many forms from our numerous community supporters, helped us make these multi-community arts engagements happen!
If interested in supporting our work in 2022 and beyond, please feel free to contact us.