IU architecture faculty Leticia Pardo awarded Mexico's top artist grant

Indiana University Assistant Professor of Architecture Leticia Pardo has been awarded the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte grant by the Secretaría de Cultura in Mexico. Widely considered the most significant recognition in Mexico for artists, the grant encompasses all creative disciplines, from architecture and the visual arts to choreography, filmmaking, and indigenous literature, and provides funding for awardees with solid trajectories to develop a research-based project over the course of three years.

Since 1993, the grant has recognized 200 artists annually for their contributions to Mexican cultural and artistic identity.  A member of the faculty of the J. Irwin Miller Architecture Program in the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design, Pardo is one of only six awardees within the architectural category. A full list of the awards announced September 26, 2025 is available here.

Pardo is a Mexican American multidisciplinary artist and architectural designer whose practice lies in the boundaries between research, art, and architecture. Previously Creative Director of Exhibition Design at The Art Institute of Chicago, Pardo has designed exhibitions at multiple internationally renowned institutions. The work of exhibition design deeply informs Pardo’s visual art practice insofar as it is attuned to context. "I am always thinking about how stories can be displayed," she has said. Throughout her artistic practice, Pardo explores subjects of placemaking and belonging, and how they manifest in the built environment.

With support from the Sistema de Creadores grant, Pardo proposes to use sculptural experiments and architectural representation to expand her research-based project “Greetings from Chicagoacán” into the broader Midwest, documenting the ways in which a sense of belonging manifests in neighborhoods shaped by the Mexican diaspora.

The project “Greetings from Chicagoacán” constituted one half of the exhibition “Thus We Advance, Harvesting Our Caravans,” held at the MAS Context Reading Room in Chicago from May 15-June 14, 2025. A collaboration with urban researcher and photographer Inés Vachez Palomar, the exhibition juxtaposed the built environments and placemaking efforts of Mexican communities on both sides of the border. 

Pardo identifies elements from vernacular architecture in Mexico (arches, terra cotta bricks, murals, and pre-Hispanic design elements) added into façades of Midwestern architecture in neighborhoods that have long been home to Chicago’s Mexican community as “expressions of identity … creat[ing] a sense of belonging,” as she writes. The exhibition “posits architectural expression,” wrote Philana Quan in Architectural Exhibition, “as a means of transnational self-determination.”

In her current collaboration “A Matter of the Invisible” at the National Building Art Center outside of St. Louis (September 27-November 21, 2025), Pardo examines how histories of Mexican labor are inscribed -- although often overlooked -- within the built environment of the heartland. In the setting of a former steel foundry, Pardo’s project “Palíndromo” engages the post-industrial landscape of the Rust Belt as a living archive of labor. In gathering and arranging metal railroad spikes and casting railroad tracks in latex, Pardo indexes the work of the Mexican workers who, through the Bracero Program at mid-century, laid railroads across the Southwest and Central Plains. Her project “Palíndromo” reinserts the contributions of these braceros within the industrial and agricultural history of the United States, a history from which they are markedly absent.

“A Matter of the Invisible”, curated by Pia Singh, pairs “Palíndromo” with the project “Metabolic Drift” by Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford, associate professor of fine arts, IU Northwest. (The exhibition was covered in Hyperallergic and Impulse Magazine.)

Pardo regularly incorporates her creative research into her teaching in the Eskenazi School's Miller Architecture Program. “I hope to demonstrate to students embarking on architectural studies that understanding the built environment can launch interdisciplinary exploration,” Pardo explained. "Even if students plan to work in the corporate field, I remind them that they are, above all, creatives."

Previously, Pardo was awarded the Mexican government’s prize for artists under the age of 35, the Jóvenes Creadores (Young Creators). Her work has been featured at the FotoMuseo Cuatro Caminos in Mexico City, the São Paulo Architecture Biennial, and the Chicago Architecture Biennial, among other exhibitions. Pardo received her B. Arch at the School of Architecture at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City, her M.S. in Interior Design from Pratt Institute in New York, and her M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

For more information please contact

Yaël Ksander
Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design
(812) 855-5512
yksander@iu.edu