Artist: Jonathan Michael Castillo (American)
Title: Immigrant Owned photo series
Date: 2022
Medium: Inkjet print
Dimensions: 43 × 55.7 cm, each
Credit: Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Art and Community Fund purchase, 2025.27

From February 4 to March 8, 2026, a number of works from this series will be on view in The Living Room at The Block Museum of Art.

Chicago’s neighborhoods are shaped by the labor, creativity, and cultural traditions of immigrant communities. In his ongoing photographic series Immigrant Owned, Chicago-based photographer and educator Jonathan Michael Castillo documents the small businesses that serve as both economic entry points and community anchors across the city. A portfolio of ten photographs from this series has entered The Block Museum of Art’s collection, strengthening the museum’s holdings in socially engaged contemporary photography and Chicago-centered artistic practice.

Created through close collaboration with business owners and workers, the photographs include dignified portraits of individuals at work as well as carefully composed images of storefronts and interiors. Castillo foregrounds the agency of his collaborators, responding to how they wish to be seen. Some subjects appear directly, poised and self-possessed within their workplaces. Other images focus on the spaces themselves, where everyday details subtly reveal the communities they serve.

“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.”

The works in The Block’s portfolio span a wide range of Chicago neighborhoods, including Uptown, Rogers Park, Chinatown, Pilsen, Little Village, Belmont Central, and Little India. Together they reflect the breadth of immigrant entrepreneurship across the city. Castillo has observed that many Chicagoans regularly visit only a small number of the city’s seventy-seven neighborhoods. Immigrant Owned intentionally counters this pattern, inviting viewers to encounter places, histories, and communities beyond their own daily routes.

Castillo’s project also extends into the public realm. Seventeen photographs from Immigrant Owned are installed as large-scale illuminated light boxes at Chicago O’Hare International Airport, commissioned by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events. Located in the international arrivals area between immigration and customs processing, the installation welcomes thousands of travelers each day with images that foreground immigrant labor, resilience, and belonging at a major point of entry to the United States.

Immigrant Owned underscores how small businesses function as spaces of self-determination and cultural continuity. Castillo’s photographs render visible an essential and often overlooked dimension of American life, affirming that immigrant-owned businesses are not peripheral to the national narrative but central to it.

–Text based on acquisition research by Kate Hadley Toftness, Assistant Director of Advancement and Strategic Initiatives

Header Image: Jonathan Michael Castillo (American), Dora, Kaneshie Supermarket, Chicago (Uptown), from the series Immigrant Owned, 2022, printed 2025, Inkjet print, 12 15/16 × 19 3/8 in. Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Art and Community Fund purchase, 2025.27i. Image copyright of the artist.