3rd Annual Latinx Festival of the Arts

 

Immigrant Owned

Solo Exhibition by Jonathan Michael Castillo​

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Opening Reception October 16th, 20266pm- 9pm 

3314 S Morgan st Chicago - Storefront Gallery

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Immigrant Owned presents recent photographic work by Jonathan Michael Castillo as one of two featured solo exhibitions in the 3rd Annual Latinx Festival of the Arts. The exhibition is installed in a storefront on South Morgan Street, a working commercial room on a block shaped by successive generations of arrival. Site and subject converge: photographs of immigrant-owned businesses are shown within one.

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Castillo's subject is the vernacular commercial interior. The hair salon, the convenience store, the laundromat, the hardware store. These are spaces so ordinary that they resist attention, and their ubiquity is precisely what allows them to go unexamined. The exhibition proceeds by pairing formal portraits of business owners with photographs of the interiors they have built and maintained. Neither register operates alone. The portrait situates a person within an economy; the interior records the accumulated decisions, arrangements, and improvisations through which that person has made a room their own. Read together, the pairings resist the two failures that commonly attend documentary work of this kind: the subject reduced to a type, and the space emptied of the labor that produced it.

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The work is built through sustained relationships rather than brief encounters. Castillo's method involves returning, asking, and remaining, and the resulting images carry the specificity that only time affords. This is not incidental to the project's argument. Immigrant life in the United States is most often discussed in aggregate, through statistics and policy abstraction, and it is the particular that disappears first in such accounts. By insisting on this owner, this counter, this handwritten sign, Castillo restores the granularity that public discourse routinely strips away.

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Assembled, the photographs constitute a portrait of an economy. Small business ownership has long served as a primary point of entry into American economic life for new arrivals, and it remains among the clearest expressions of the values this country claims for itself: enterprise, self-determination, and the construction of a future for one's children. A persistent counter-narrative holds that immigrants come to take. The evidence gathered here documents the opposite. Businesses founded, employment generated, taxes contributed, and risk absorbed by people who arrived with no guarantee of return.

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Within the Latinx Festival of the Arts, an annual platform for contemporary practice by Latinx artists in Chicago, Castillo's exhibition extends a shared set of concerns into documentary photography's long engagement with American labor and place. It also returns those concerns to street level, to the block, and to the storefront, where the claim the work makes can be tested against the neighborhood immediately outside the door.

As the artist puts it: immigrant-owned businesses are as American as it gets.

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America has always been a place of promise and potential. People from all over the world for generations have immigrated to this country for a fresh start and a better future for their children.  Small businesses and an entrepreneurial spirit have long been part of the integral fabric of thriving American communities. Working at a small business or starting one, is a very common entry point into the American economy and jobs market for immigrants who are new to the United States. It’s easy to take for granted the local hair salon, convenience store, laundromat, or hardware store in your neighborhood, many of which are owned or operated by immigrants. My interest is in building relationships that explore the roots of immigrant business, the local and specific spaces that give character to any neighborhood. These places are where people carve out space for themselves, their families, and new immigrants on their own terms. Through portraiture and photographs of interior spaces, my work renders an essential and often overlooked part of the American economy. Many people think that immigrants come to the United States to “take”, but the reality is they contribute to our economy by creating jobs and paying taxes. Immigrants take enterprising risks and are the embodiment of the American dream. My work is a reminder that immigrant owned businesses are as American as it gets.

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-Jonathan Michael Castillo

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Jonathan Michael Castillo is a photographer, visual artist, and educator whose work spans photography, video and handmade paper to examine immigration, labor, debt, and systems of government. He is a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow in Photography and the 2026 Joyce Foundation Artadia Awardee. He has a permanent installation of his work at O'Hare International Airport, and his work is held in the collections of the Block Museum of Art and the Illinois State Museum.

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