Iván Argote: DIGNIDAD

Extending the Floating Monuments series, DIGNIDAD will move through Chicago as a drifting monument to dignity and solidarity.

Floating Museum is proud to present DIGNIDAD, a new large-scale, mobile public artwork with artist Iván Argote, and curated by Carla Acevedo-Yates. The project will launch June 13–14, 2026, in Humboldt Park, Chicago, and will continue to travel across neighborhoods throughout the city and beyond. The launch will include the debut of DIGNIDAD in the Puerto Rican People’s Day Parade, performances, and community-led events that activate the sculpture as both stage and participant.

DIGNIDAD is the fourth installment in Floating Museum’s ongoing Floating Monuments series, which reimagines the monument not as a fixed object anchored to a single site, but as a mobile, collective platform that activates public space through movement, encounter, and participation. The series shows how monuments can function as dynamic structures that gather people, stories, and forms of public life rather than static markers of the past. 

The Spanish word “dignidad” operates both as a linguistic and political gesture—foregrounding the presence of Spanish-speaking communities in Chicago while asserting dignity as a fundamental, collective condition rather than an abstract ideal. Composed of large-scale concrete letters spelling out the word, the monument will move throughout the city on a flatbed truck, circulating through streets, parks, and civic spaces while producing temporary sites of gathering and visibility. 

DIGNIDAD was conceived through a two-year engagement with the Puerto Rican Agenda of Chicago and community of Humboldt Park, during which Floating Museum, Argote, and Acevedo-Yates attended community meetings to inform and collectively brainstorm around the project. DIGNIDAD is directly inspired by the community’s history of resistance and transcultural solidarity, and emphasizes that dignity is not something that can be censored or diminished. The work takes on a direct and urgent articulation: a monument that does not commemorate a distant past, but instead asserts a shared condition and collective demand in the present.

“As an artist, public space is my primary site of action,” said Iván Argote. “The street tells us the complexities of history in real time. With DIGNIDAD, I wanted to create a work that carries a sense of resilience, resistance, and solidarity—something that can move through the city and be claimed by the people who encounter it.” 

This project builds on Argote’s longstanding practice of intervening in public space to question dominant historical narratives and the authority of monumental form. Raised in Colombia in a family deeply shaped by political organizing, Argote developed an early awareness of how power, violence, and memory are inscribed in public space, taking note of who is commemorated, who is erased, and who gets to decide. Working across cities including Bogotá, Madrid, Paris, and New York, Argote has developed a body of work that destabilizes monuments of power while proposing new, more inclusive forms of public symbolism. 

Following the launch in June, the monument will continue to drift through Chicago’s neighborhoods, appearing in civic, cultural, and everyday spaces, examining how visibility, belonging, and power are unevenly distributed across urban space. Although the scale of the project is monumental, its impact will be measured in everyday encounters as people leave work, pick up their children from school, or walk through the park with a loved one. 

“Public art has long served a vital civic role for Chicago’s Puerto Rican community, sparking dialogue around identity and place while inspiring collective action toward self-determination. DIGNIDAD affirms a core community value: that dignity is an inalienable human right. At a moment defined by widespread deportations and the mounting intimidation of Latine communities across this country, the urgency of this work could not be more profound,” said Carla Acevedo-Yates.

Like other works in the Floating Monuments series, DIGNIDAD emerges from a sustained engagement with the city as a landscape of memory, symbols, and contested meanings. It does not monumentalize a single event or figure, but instead offers a shared language—simple, direct, and powerful—that can be inhabited by different communities across time and space. 

“DIGNIDAD reflects our ongoing interest in how monuments can operate as platforms rather than objects,” said Floating Museum co-directors avery r. young, Faheem Majeed, Andrew Schachman, and Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford. “By moving through the city, the work resists becoming invisible in a moment when questions of dignity, visibility, and belonging need to be collectively held.”

This project was made possible with the support of The Mellon Foundation. Find more information on the Floating Museum website floatingmuseum.org.

Program overview: June 13–14, 2026, Humboldt Park, Chicago. Public activations will accompany the launch of DIGNIDAD, including:

–Debut of DIGNIDAD in the Puerto Rican People’s Day Parade
–Drifting the monument through the park and the surrounding neighborhood
–Artists and curator-led conversations in collaboration with local partners
–Performances including participation from Chicago’s Poet Laureate, Mayda del Valle

The press kit can be found here. Press contact: floatingmuseum@culturalcounsel.com.