The halls that house The Chicago High School for the Arts have a history of creative expression coupled with resistance, and Andrea Gonzales knows them well.

The senior visual art student is the second generation in her family to study in the vast building in Humboldt Park — once home to Lafayette Elementary School — the school her mother attended in the 1980s — decades before it closed in 2013.

Adorning the walls is a mural depicting protests sparked by that closure over a decade ago — moments memorialized in art by students who attend ChiArts, which took over the building in 2014. Gonzales is pictured with her mother in what was her fifth-grade classroom when it was Lafayette Elementary, smiling at each other from different desks.

Earlier this month, when ChiArts’ board said it would

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