Bibiana Suárez was born and raised in Puerto Rico but has resided in Chicago since 1980. She has a BFA (1984) and an MFA (1989) in painting and drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a professor emerita from The Art School at DePaul University.

Suárez has exhibited in the United States as well as in Puerto Rico and Mexico. Her most recent work, De: Lata (To Give Us Away), was shown at the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture in Chicago, March 10 - November 4, 2022. Her installation project Memoria (Memory) was exhibited at the Hyde Park Art Center in 2011 (Chicago), Space Gallery in 2018 (Pittsburgh), and at the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico in 2019 (San Juan). Other exhibitions include Domino/Dominó at El Museo del Barrio in New York and the Illinois Arts Gallery (1999) in Chicago; De Pico a Pico (Beak to Beak - Face to Face) at Sazama Gallery, Chicago (1993); Island Adrift: The Puerto Rican Identity in Exile at Taller Puertorriqueño in Philadelphia (1993); In Search of an Island also at Sazama Gallery (1991) and A Grafito at the Art Students league in San Juan, Puerto Rico (1985).

Suárez's work is currently on view as part of the exhibition 21st-Century Art of Puerto Rico and Its Diaspora at the Katherine E. Nash Gallery of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis (until December 6, 2025). Her work was also included in entre Horizontes: Art and Activism Between Chicago and Puerto Rico at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art and at The DePaul Art Museum in the exhibition Life Cycles, both in 2024. Other group exhibitions she has participated are: Repatriación/Repatriation, Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, San Juan, (2019); Images on File, Stuart & Co. Art Gallery, Chicago (2018); and, Homecoming, National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture (NPRAC), Chicago (2014 ); 1898: DIWA Arts, Rene J. Marquez, Maria Martinez-Cañas and Bibiana Suárez at the Bronx Museum of the Arts (1998); Puerto Rican Equation at Hunter College (1998) in New York; Second Sight: Printmaking in Chicago, at the Mary Leigh Block Gallery of Northwestern University in Chicago (1996): National Drawing Invitational, The Arkansas Art Center in Little Rock (1992); In the Heart of the Country/ En el corazón del país, The Chicago Cultural Center (1991); Adivina! Chicago Latino Expressions at the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art in Chapultepec, Mexico City (1998); and Expresiones Hispanas, a two-year traveling exhibition from the Mexican Cultural Institute in San Antonio (1988-89).

Suárez has also been the recipient of several awards including three Illinois Arts Council Individual Visual Artist Fellowship Awards (1991, 1994, 1999), an Arts Midwest/NEA Regional Visual Arts Fellowship (1992) and was the inaugural recipient of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture’s (University of Chicago) Artist in Residence Fellowship in 2003-2004. In autumn 2011, Suárez was a faculty fellow in the Center for Latino Research at DePaul.

BIBIANA SUÁREZ

BIBIANA SUÁREZ

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