Apr 29 2026

GWS End of Year Celebration and CECSCO Awards

April 29, 2026

5:30 PM - 7:00 PM America/Chicago

Location

Jane Addams Hull-House Museum Residents' Dining Hall

Address

800 S. Halsted Street, Chicago, IL 60607

Calendar

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A flier whose background is made up of multi-colored (red, orange, blue, pink, purple, green) overlapping large balloons. Across the top center reads UIC next to the GWS logo in dark blue text. Beneath it in large dark blue, block letters read

UIC Gender & Women's Studies Invites You to Our End of Year Celebration and CECSCO Awards!

Join us to celebrate our graduating students and student award winners and learn how feminist art & organizing are defending, engaging, & transforming communities.

At this event, we will present the Civic Engagement, Community Service, and Community Organizing Award (CECSCO) to UIC alumni Maria Gaspar and Rey Wences - two inspiring activists who will share their reflections on sustaining collective struggles for justice.

Registration is required by Thursday, April 23, at 5 p.m. CST.

For further event details and to register, please visit go.uic.edu/GWSCelebrate.

Please contact gwsinfo@uic.edu with questions or concerns.

Let's celebrate our power, our resistance, and our commitment to Gender & Women's Studies!

RSVP

Contact

GWS
gwsinfo@uic.edu

Date posted

Apr 1, 2026

Date updated

Apr 1, 2026

Speakers

Maria Gaspar

Maria Gaspar is a Chicago-born, first-generation, interdisciplinary artist negotiating the politics of location through installation, sculpture, sound, and performance. Gaspar’s body of work addresses issues of spatial justice to amplify, mobilize, or redirect structures of power through individual and collective gestures. For the past decade, Gaspar has been recognized nationally for her multi-year projects that attempt to dismantle borders, transcend penal matter, and turn places of precarity into places of possibility. Formative works such as “Radioactive: Stories from Beyond the Wall” and “96 Acres Project” include art interventions at the country's largest single-site jail, the Cook County Jail, and in her childhood neighborhood. Gaspar has received the Guggenheim Award for Creative Arts, the Latinx Artist Fellowship, the United States Artists Fellowship, the Frieze Impact Prize, the Sor Juana Women of Achievement Award in Art and Activism from the National Museum of Mexican Art, and other notable recognitions. The Art for Justice Fund has supported Gaspar’s projects, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Robert Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellowship, the Creative Capital Award, and the Art Matters Foundation. Gaspar has lectured and exhibited at venues including MoMA PS1, New York, NY; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, Santa Cruz, CA; and the Pérez Art Museum in Miami, FL. Gaspar received her BFA in Painting from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY, and her MFA in Studio Arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Rey Wences

Rey Wences (pronouns: they/them) was born in Mexico City and raised in Chicago, Illinois. Rey grew up undocumented and became involved in community organizing after graduating high school. In 2009, they co-founded the Immigrant Youth Justice League (IYJL), an undocumented-led organization in Chicago that spearheaded the “Come Out of the Shadows” campaign the following year. By 2013, Rey and other local organizers created Organized Communities Against Deportations (OCAD), a community organization focused on campaigns against deportations, immigrant detention, and the criminalization of immigrant communities in Illinois. During their time as campaign organizer with OCAD between 2018 and 2020, Rey coordinated a coalition of grassroots organizations. He led the campaigns to Erase the Gang Database in Cook County and the City of Chicago. In 2019, the coalition successfully pushed the Sheriff to decommission the county’s gang database. Today, Rey draws on 17 years of experience in grassroots organizing, direct action, and communications strategies with communities in cities like Chicago, Atlanta, Phoenix, and New Orleans to oppose the criminalization of immigrants. In 2020, Rey served as Director of Communications at Organized Power in Numbers (formerly Unemployed Workers United), a national organization focused on economic justice. By 2023, Rey returned to serve as Chicago's First Deputy Mayor of Immigrant, Migrant, and Refugee Rights under Mayor Brandon Johnson. Today, they lead the Deportation Defense efforts at the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, where they support the expansion of the Illinois Rapid Response Network and the Family Support Network Hotline, which was instrumental in fighting back against federal immigration enforcement in 2025.