Growing with Music, 2024.
Mixed Media: Cigar box, wood coffee stirrers, copper wire, jewelry wire, florist wire, mirror, jot glue sheer jewelry pouch, and random accessories. Purchase

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Art by Gregory Diaz
Prose by Irvin Ibarra

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The day the music stopped

I don’t remember much from the time I was a kid, but I remember that face I’d see in the mirror. The reflection of that once Stubborn Child I was.

You know the one.
The kid who wouldn’t eat anything their mother would cook if it were colored a crimson red or creamy green.
The kid who ducked away from family pictures and hated being sung Happy Birthday for whatever reason.
The kid who made an outing such an inconvenience and ignored the music their parents played on the radio.

But they never truly ignored the melody that played on the countless car rides. Even if they could, you’d always feel the volume in your chest. Getting home, sitting on the cold wooden floor with the bedroom door shut with more desire to listen.

And I listened. So much of my youth wrapped around soothing music over arguments I wasn’t meant to hear. The beats from drums which served as cover for whatever happened downstairs, and the güiro which stuck alongside the muffled crying in the other room.

As I grew older, I kept listening to the now nostalgic music that served as a reminder of those simpler days. A time when it was noise that hid under the melodies was purely incomprehensible to me. Listening back to the Stubborn Child screaming back at me through some abyss of memories somewhere deep along a thought trail I can’t exactly reach.

Then, there came a day when the cold from the floorboards traveled up to the walls of my room. A day when the radio was left broken and the muffled cries from the other room were all I heard. The day I learned that all the rooms here were just as cold as mine. The day I saw you crying in the kitchen alone.

It was the day the music stopped, and my only desire now is a warm home

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Irvin Ibarra, also known as Plantboy Chicago, is a first-generation Mexican-American multimedia artist, writer, and journalist born and raised in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. Irvin graduated from Columbia College-Chicago in December 2022 with a Bachelor’s degree in Communications and a Minor in Journalism. Formally working as a reporter and photojournalist at The Columbia Chronicle, he uses his art and lived experience to advocate and uplift stories that reflect himself and his local community.

Gregory Diaz | Self taught artist practicing the art of sculpture through copper, primarily working in wire, twisting up poseable characters for over a decade, incorporating an array of items from jewelry & toy accessories to hardware, keychains and random household items.

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1000 Words | Home Not Home Artists + Writers

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