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Andrea Peguero Gonzalez is an illustrator and interdisciplinary artist from Monterrey, MX currently living in the Chicagoland area. Fueled by her wish to tell stories through visual media, Andrea has been creating since her early childhood, which eventually led her to pursue a creative career. In May of 2025, she will be graduating from North Central College in Naperville, IL with a BFA degree in Studio Art and a minor in Graphic Design. As a student, Andrea worked as the Art and Design Department student worker and served in the department’s Design Agency, as well as participated as a creative director in the student organization of the Untitled! Experimental Performance Group.
As of spring of 2025, she has participated in multiple shows at North Central, including her solo shows Cielito, Cielote in the spring of 2022 and CÍTRICA in the spring of 2025, along with the group exhibitions Growing Pains: The Birth of an Artist in the fall of 2023 and Nurtured Nature in the spring of 2025. In 2024, she received a Richter Grant from North Central College for her honors thesis, Fruits of My Labor: Writing, Illustrating, and Designing a Picture Book About Creativity and Burnout. Today, Andrea continues to work on illustrations, commissions, and various multi-media projects.
Philosophy Statement
In 2011, I became an immigrant along with the rest of my immediate family. Although this was a big change that brought upon me many years of grief, loss of identity, and anxiety, I also am aware that I have found a tremendous amount of joy due to these very same circumstances, such as friends, love, and new opportunities. As an illustrator and interdisciplinary artist, I seek to embrace this fickle nature of joy and how it ebbs and flows within the fabric of our stories. Regardless of the medium, I consistently challenge the notion of art as a “serious” form of expression by maintaining a bright and playful approach that greets one with both enthusiasm and vulnerability. As a result, the audience is invited to remember the constant existence of joy and how it perpetually moves within all of us for as long as we live.
In my illustrations, I focus on embedding moments of personal reflection into surreal and fantastical environments. I draw inspiration from traditional Western storybook illustration and its narrative-led approach to compositions to invite the audience to interpret a single moment through stylized, representational imagery. I add meaning through symbols in my narrative scenes, such as lemons to represent the human desire for creative work, and the sky to encapsulate the idea of change through weather patterns. In order to maintain a dynamic and bright visual experience, I use water-based paint markers and colored pencil on paper or board, resulting in pieces saturated with vibrant mark-making and layered hues.
Not only does my work explore the behavior of joy as its subject, but it also seeks to explore it as a facet of the artistic process. Because artmaking is both a source of joy and stress in my life, I periodically chase new avenues of exploration that allow me to find joy in unexpected material interactions. Through this process, I have come into contact with digital media, casting, printmaking, textiles, embroidery, crochet, collage, vinyl cutting, and many other techniques for the first time in my artistic career. When experimenting, I assume the role of learner and actively work to let go of my hostile perfectionist tendencies. As a result, I ignite my artistic intuition and craft pieces driven exclusively by my curiosity and happiness, thereby encouraging the viewer to venture out and make their own version of happiness.