The Music Book: Harmonizing the Past and Present exhibit opens August 18 at Harold Washington Library Center. Part of the 2024-2025 Arts and Music Department Call for Artists, Music Book will showcase the mixed-media artwork of Donna Castellanos.
Donna Castellanos is a Chicagoland-based artist and an alum of Chicago’s American Academy of Art with a degree in Illustration/Graphic Design. Her art evolved into assemblage work, integrating her found treasures. She finds her art supplies in thrift shops and estates sales, and she considers herself a rescuer of once-loved things. She is drawn to encyclopedias and books, especially ones featuring gold embossed covers, vintage illustrations, bindings and cardboard covers.
Castellanos seeks to preserve the spirit of people who have passed by incorporating the items that once belonged to them into her art. She tells the history of their lives through the books they’ve read, the objects they collected, and the mementos they saved and cherished. She has created large community artwork and designed and taught children and adults at the Elmhurst Art Museum.
"Bertha," a portrait of Castellano’s grandmother made entirely of sewing notions, was a finalist in The Outwin: American Portraiture Today 2022 exhibition at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. She has led five hands-on public outreach programs throughout the exhibition. She accepted commissions to design and teach five additional programs: two with sight-impaired children and adults and one with an underserved high school group at the Orlando Museum of Art. She will lead a final program at The GRAM in Grand Rapids, MI in September 2024.
Donna Castellanos’s Music Book: Harmonizing the Past with the Present is on display from August 18 to September 28, 2024 on the 8th Floor of Harold Washington Library Center.
