Andrés Lemus-Spont is an artist, designer, educator, fabricator, and proud child of Mexican immigrants. Much of Andrés' work engages with themes of community empowerment, equity, and creative exploration, particularly focusing on how collaborative play, craft, and experimentation can lead us to radical futures.
With Marya Spont-Lemus, Andrés co-founded ¡Anímate! Studio, a shared community arts practice that is a vehicle for playful, intergenerational creative workshops in public space that invite re-imagining and re-making through hands-on exercises in critical pedagogy. From 2015-2019 that work took the form of the FrankenToyMobile, a pedal-powered makerspace that encouraged imagination and curiosity by providing free workshops in which youth and adults reused toys as raw materials for original creations. Also through ¡Anímate!, Andrés is a founding member of the Mobilize Creative Collaborative (with Marya, Aquil Charlton, and William Estrada), which utilizes bicycle-based makerspaces to provide free, accessible arts workshops in public spaces across Chicago's South and Southwest Sides. Building upon our respective practices of joy, play, and communal creation, the MCC activates spaces through arts-based organizing and critical dialogue.
Andrés founded and currently directs Building Brown Workshop (2016-present), a design and fabrication studio serving artists, architects, and communities. Andrés is also a co-founder of Cooperation Racine (with Andrea Yarbrough, Kayla Reefer, Tavia David, and Saleem Hue Penny), an alternative worker-cooperative founded by Black and Brown artists and makers. This cooperative creative hub in Englewood (scheduled to open by 2026) will feature facilities like a community gallery, multimedia studios, and live-work apartments, providing equitably-priced spaces and workshops in woodworking, photography, writing, and visual arts. Focused on equitable economic development, Cooperation Racine anchors the arts ecosystem in cooperative economics to rewrite a history of redlining and disinvestment, fostering social change and community empowerment.
In addition to his community-based teaching artist practice, Andrés has taught art, architecture, and related subjects for kindergarteners through adult learners, in programs through Marwen, CAPE, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Illinois Humanities, and others. Andrés believes strongly in the value of mentoring and has done so formally through Big Brothers Big Sisters and informally through various apprenticeships for college and early-career designers. He studied architecture at College of DuPage and Illinois Institute of Technology, and resides in the McKinley Park neighborhood on Chicago’s Southwest Side.
Profile caption: William Estrada
Featured Artworks
FrankenToyMobile
Photo by Evan Barr
FrankenToyMobile
FrankenToyMobile
Photo by Becca Waterloo
