Jorge Lucero is a Mexican-American artist who currently serves as Full Professor of Art Education, in the School of Art & Design, where he formally served as Program Chair from 2015 to 2023. Concurrently since 2023, Lucero serves as Associate Dean for Research in the College of Fine and Applied Arts, also at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
As part of his decades-long work to test the creative and conceptual pliability of "school as material" Lucero participates in and around the academy in every manner possible. He has exhibited, performed, published, and taught through his work all over the U.S. and abroad.
His bookworks include Mere and Easy: Collage as a Critical Practice in Pedagogy (2016, U of I Press)**, What Happens at the Intersection of Conceptual Art and Teaching? (2023, w/ Catalina Hernandez-Cabal through the Amsterdam University of the Arts), and Teacher as Artist-in-Residence: The Most Radical Form of Expression to Ever Exist (2020, The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts) amongst others.
In 2023, Lucero received the National Art Education Association’s Higher Ed Educator of the Year Award at their annual conference in San Antonio, TX.
He is an alum of The Pennsylvania State University and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Prior to higher education Lucero co-constructed an education-as-art-practice with his students and colleagues at the Chicago Public School, Northside College Prep High School for seven life-changing years.
***Read reviews of Mere and Easy here: Wabash Center; and here, IJETA