Chicago Style Graffiti and Street Art

Along wall that runs under the El tracks just south of the Devon at Loyola's Lakeshore campus are these Graffiti murals: 

What do these murals evoke in you?  What do you think when you see them?  How do they make you feel?  What do you associate them with?

Some people will associate these generally with "urban" America or minorities or crime or vandalism or even street gangs.  While these associations may be true in some cases, many may not realize that graffiti is distinctly different from tagging and street art.  And as it's own art, graffiti has unique styles, including a Chicago style.

The Newberry Library covered the Chicago style in a presentation with Pengo, East and Dulce Maria Diaz available to watch at the Newberry's Youtube Channel here:

Here was an exhibition of Chicago style graffiti that was on display at the Epiphany Center for the Arts:

Also:

Here are 22 street murals from Secret Chicago.

Here is a guide to other street art in Chicago 

From Chicago Council on Global Affairs, How Chicago's street art connects the city to the world,

Chicago boasts over 400 murals, according to the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events Mural Registry. Though the art form has taken off in recent years — more than four dozen new murals were added to the registry between 2021 and 2022, for instance — Chicago also has an unusually long history of muraling. The “Wall of Respect,” created in Bronzeville in 1967, is thought by many to be the first example of the type of outdoor community mural that is commonplace in American cities today — and, though it no longer stands, several Chicago-area murals from that era still do. John Pitman Weber, a Chicago artist who co-founded the Chicago Public Art Group, told the Chicago Sun-Times that three Humboldt Park murals dating back to 1971 could be the oldest surviving community murals in the country.  

One of the three is “The Crucifixion of Don Pedro Albizu Campos,” painted by the Puerto Rican Art Association. It shows figures from Puerto Rico’s Nationalist Party, who advocated for the island’s freedom and revolted in 1950. 

Murals like these that represent Chicago’s immigrant populations are a common sight across the city. Mexican muralist Hector Duarte, for instance, has created over 50 pieces of public art in the more than 30 years he has worked in Chicago, and most of his works tell the story of Chicago’s Mexican community. One notable example appears on the side of Duarte’s Pilsen home and studio, where the 3,000-square-foot “Gulliver en el País de las Maravillas” depicts a Mexican immigrant as the titular character from
“Gulliver’s Travels.”

Pilsen in general is an important site for immigrant muraling. The neighborhood has been the center of the Mexican American mural movement since 1968, when Mario Castillo painted an anti-Vietnam War mural on the side of the Halsted Urban Progress Center and set off a wave of Chicano street art in the area.  

Using art to show solidarity

More recently, artists in Chicago have used murals to express solidarity with places in conflict. Earlier this year, artist Langston Allston unveiled a new mural in Pilsen depicting Palestinians against a war-torn backdrop. The mural, organized by the nonprofit Mural Movement, came as the Israel-Hamas war passed the 100-day mark, and it was meant to show a growing solidarity between Chicago’s Palestinian, Black, and Latino communities.

“A lot of people are like, ‘Oh, it’s none of our business or whatever’ … but who has really shown up for Chicago people?” Mural Movement founder Delilah Martinez told WBBM. “It has been a lot of my Palestinian friends consistently through the years.”  

In Ukrainian Village, murals painted since Russia’s full-scale invasion have invoked solidarity and community in the neighborhood. Artist Sean Archer painted a mural on the Ukrainian Village Veterinary Center’s wall in 2022 depicting a young Ukrainian woman with flowers coming out of her palm. Each flower has significance to Ukraine: sunflowers, an “unofficial national symbol” of peace; poppies, a symbol for the remembrance of victims of war; kalyna berries, which have deep roots in Ukrainian folklore; and marigolds, traditionally placed in wreaths to represent fidelity and devotion. 

How public art can help business  

Wicker Park and Bucktown are home to over 40 murals and public art installations, including “Kintsugi Memories” by Japanese artist Mami Takahashi. That work consists of two blocks of sidewalk along Milwaukee Avenue, whose cracks Takahashi filled with gold epoxy using the traditional method kintsugi, by which broken pottery is repaired with gold. 

Alice Howe oversees the Wicker Park Bucktown Special Service Area (SSA), which funds public art projects in the neighborhood using taxpayer dollars from property taxes. The SSA is administered by the Wicker Park Bucktown Chamber of Commerce. 

Howe told ChicagoGlobal that the SSA is always looking to represent diverse perspectives and cultures in the neighborhood’s public art. For “Kintsugi Memories,” it was actually Takahashi who approached the SSA.

“So we were really excited to see that,” Howe said. “We have a pretty high foot traffic of tourism, and we want to keep that international element. I think that draws artists specifically to Wicker Park because they will get that exposure, so we just want to continue drawing on that.” 

The SSA has multiple ways that public art projects come to fruition. An arts committee made up of local business owners and artists can help brainstorm projects; artists can approach the SSA, as Takahashi did; and business owners can commission artists to paint murals on their businesses’ walls. All of this can help bring foot traffic to the neighborhood and its businesses, Howe said. 

“Most recently we just did a collaboration with Heaven Gallery on the back of their building to do a memorial mural that can be seen from the Blue Line station,” she said. “For that one specifically, we were able to do a pretty large ribbon-cutting and an opening ceremony that drew a lot of people to the business.” 

Chicago Made: Factory Networks in the Industrial Metropolis by Robert Lewis

Robert Lewis's book Chicago Made from U of Chicago Press,

From the lumberyards and meatpacking factories of the Southwest Side to the industrial suburbs that arose near Lake Calumet at the turn of the twentieth century, manufacturing districts shaped Chicago’s character and laid the groundwork for its transformation into a sprawling metropolis. Approaching Chicago’s story as a reflection of America’s industrial history between the Civil War and World War II, Chicago Made explores not only the well-documented workings of centrally located city factories but also the overlooked suburbanization of manufacturing and its profound effect on the metropolitan landscape.

            Robert Lewis documents how manufacturers, attracted to greenfield sites on the city’s outskirts, began to build factory districts there with the help of an intricate network of railroad owners, real estate developers, financiers, and wholesalers. These immense networks of social ties, organizational memberships, and financial relationships were ultimately more consequential, Lewis demonstrates, than any individual achievement. Beyond simply giving Chicago businesses competitive advantages, they transformed the economic geography of the region. Tracing these transformations across seventy-five years, Chicago Made establishes a broad new foundation for our understanding of urban industrial America. 

Table of Contents:

BUILDING THE INDUSTRIAL METROPOLIS

1    Chicago, the Mighty City
2    The Suburban Solution
3    Four Factory Districts, 1860–1940
4    The Shifting Geography of Metropolitan Employment:

      Starts, Additions, & Moves

SECTION II.

NETWORKING THE INDUSTRIAL METROPOLIS

5    The Metropolitan Geography of Firm Linkages, 1872–1901
6    Forging the Calumet District, 1880–1940
7    Chicago’s Planned Industrial Districts: Clearing and the

      Central Manufacturing Districts

8    Networked Space: The Connected Metropolis in the 1920s

9    Manufacturing Production Chains and Wholesaling

10  Local Production Practices and Inter-Firm Linkages:

      Chicago’s Automotive Industry, 1900–1940

Here's a review from JSTOR:

Timuel Black

 

I was fortunate to work with Timuel Black, a Chicago historian, educator and activist a number of times for over a decade.  As an aloof undergraduate in Sociology 125; Chicagoland, I went on a tour of Bronzeville with him.  Then, as a graduate student at Loyola's Center for Urban Research and Learning (CURL), I met him again and it was then when I fully appreciated his significance and brilliance. After that, I contacted him myself to bring teachers on tours of Bronzeville as a professional development opportunity.  We often stopped for lunch at one of his favorite soul food restaurants, Pearl's place before dropping him off at his house on Drexel.  He was incredibly down to earth and kind, but wise and so thoroughly knowledgable.  Then in January of 2009, in frigid weather, at the inauguration of Barack Obama I bumped into him.  By chance, we were both sitting in section orange.  I felt incredibly privileged to be at that event in that section with him.

Timuel was a Studs Terkel of Chicago's Bronzeville Neighborhood.  His book Bridges of Memory (in two volumes) captures the rich and complicated history of Bronzeville.

From the publisher:

A collection of interviews with African Americans who came to Chicago from the South. In their first great migration to Chicago that began during World War I, African Americans came from the South seeking a better life--and fleeing a Jim Crow system of racial prejudice, discrimination, and segregation. What they found was much less than what they'd hoped for, but it was much better than what they'd come from--and in the process they set in motion vast changes not only in Chicago but also in the whole fabric of American society. This book, the first of three volumes, revisits this momentous chapter in American history with those who lived it.

Oral history of the first order, Bridges of Memory lets us hear the voices of those who left social, political, and economic oppression for political freedom and opportunity such as they'd never known--and for new forms of prejudice and segregation. These children and grandchildren of ex-slaves found work in the stockyards and steel mills of Chicago, settled and started small businesses in the "Black Belt" on the South Side, and brought forth the jazz, blues, and gospel music that the city is now known for. Historian Timuel D. Black, Jr., himself the son of first-generation migrants to Chicago, interviews a wide cross-section of African Americans whose remarks and reflections touch on issues ranging from fascism to Jim Crow segregation to the origin of the blues. Their recollections comprise a vivid record of a neighborhood, a city, a society, and a people undergoing dramatic and unprecedented changes.

And his memoir is Sacred Ground: The Streets of Timuel Black

From the publisher,

Timuel Black is an acclaimed historian, activist, and storyteller. Sacred Ground: The Chicago Streets of Timuel Black chronicles the life and times of this Chicago legend.

Sacred Ground opens in 1919, during the summer of the Chicago race riot, when infant Black and his family arrive in Chicago from Birmingham, Alabama, as part of the first Great Migration. He recounts in vivid detail his childhood and education in the Black Metropolis of Bronzeville and South Side neighborhoods that make up his "sacred ground."

Revealing a priceless trove of experiences, memories, ideas, and opinions, Black describes how it felt to belong to this place, even when stationed in Europe during World War II. He relates how African American soldiers experienced challenges and conflicts during the war, illuminating how these struggles foreshadowed the civil rights movement. A labor organizer, educator, and activist, Black captures fascinating anecdotes and vignettes of meeting with famous figures of the times, such as Duke Ellington and Martin Luther King Jr., but also with unheralded people whose lives convey lessons about striving, uplift, and personal integrity.

Rounding out this memoir, Black reflects on the legacy of his friend and mentee, Barack Obama, as well as on his public works and enduring relationships with students, community workers, and some very influential figures in Chicago and the world.

Open, Free, and Clear or Restricted, Expensive and Built? The Tension on Chicago's Lakefront

 

The Chicago Reader 1991, How the Lakefront Was Won provides an insightful critical analysis of Lois Wille’s 1972 book Forever Open, Clear and Free: The Struggle for Chicago’s Lakefront and the mythos it created.

From the Reader,

Chicago’s public lakefront dates from 1836. That year three commissioners, appointed to supervise the sale of public lands to finance the Illinois and Michigan Canal, decided not to sell the narrow strip along the lakeshore between 12th and Madison streets. That muddy stretch, they declared on the plat, was to be “a public ground–a common to remain forever open, clear and free of any buildings, or other obstruction whatever.” These words were the legal foundation for subsequent court challenges to various building plans in what became Grant Park; and the spirit of these words undergirds the whole of the lakefront protection movement. 

It might do to examine that fateful decision more closely than Wille does, however. In 1836 the commissioners set aside land for a “common”–less a park than a public square. (The first U.S. urban parks as we would recognize them were not built until the 1850s.) Commons were used as parade grounds for local militia, for markets, public meetings, auctions, political rallies, and other business. Setting aside land for one was a sensible and commonplace provision in a new town, and arguing from that to a mandate for the recreational use of public land and a sweeping antidevelopment law has required some ingenious legal interpretations.

Most of the latter sprang from the pocketbook, if not the pen, of Montgomery Ward, the mail-order king who looked out over Grant Park from his Michigan Avenue office as if it were a sentry box. It was Ward who went to court four times, beginning in 1890, to stop a series of public construction projects in what became Grant Park, suing a succession of City Hall regimes eager to use the space for fire stations, armories, civic centers, museums, and libraries. 

And the 2021 book Lakefront: Public Trust and Private Rights in Chicago by Joseph Kearney and Thomas Merrill gives a more factual and legal history of Chicago's coveted lakefront.

From the publisher,

How did Chicago, a city known for commerce, come to have such a splendid public waterfront—its most treasured asset? Lakefront reveals a story of social, political, and legal conflict in which private and public rights have clashed repeatedly over time, only to produce, as a kind of miracle, a generally happy ending.

Joseph D. Kearney and Thomas W. Merrill study the lakefront's evolution from the middle of the nineteenth century to the twenty-first. Their findings have significance for understanding not only Chicago's history but also the law's part in determining the future of significant urban resources such as waterfronts.

The Chicago lakefront is where the American public trust doctrine, holding certain public resources off limits to private development, was born. This book describes the circumstances that gave rise to the doctrine and its fluctuating importance over time, and reveals how it was resurrected in the later twentieth century to become the primary principle for mediating clashes between public and private lakefront rights. Lakefront compares the effectiveness of the public trust idea to other property doctrines, and assesses the role of the law as compared with more institutional developments, such as the emergence of sanitary commissions and park districts, in securing the protection of the lakefront for public uses.

By charting its history, Kearney and Merrill demonstrate that the lakefront's current status is in part a product of individuals and events unique to Chicago. But technological changes, and a transformation in social values in favor of recreational and preservationist uses, also have been critical. Throughout, the law, while also in a state of continual change, has played at least a supporting role.

Here's Geoffery Baer's lakefront tour on PBS.  

Chicago Magazine has a 2 part tour of the Lakefront: Part 1 the Northside and Part 2 the Southside.

National Museum of Mexican American Art

 In Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood, a neighborhood that the Czech immigrants who settled it named after a town from their homeland, there is the National Museum of Mexican American Art.  This strange confluence is a great example of the changing identity of both neighborhoods and people that is highlighted by the museum's permanent collection, Nuestras Historias; Stories of Mexican Identities.

Neighborhoods, like societies, are dynamic.  They are constantly developing and changing.  Every moment is different and being recreated anew. Pilsen which was originally a home to Czech immigrants who have been replaced by more recent Mexican immigrants who kept the name.  This is how immigrants add to and remake neighborhoods and how societies grow, evolve and change with their immigrant populations.

Similarly, individuals' identities grow and change and evolve and they are complex.  The museum highlights the complexity and changing identities of Mexican-Americans.

From the exhibit,

Nuestras Historias (Our Histories) highlights the Museum’s Permanent Collection to showcase the dynamic and diversestories of Mexican identity in North America. The exhibition presents cultural identity as something that continually evolves across time, regions, and communities, rather than as a static, unchanging entity, and features ancient Mesoamerican and colonial artifacts, modern Mexican art, folk art, and contemporary works from both sides of the U.S.–Mexican border.

The vast diversity of Mexican identities demonstrated in these works defies the notion of one linear history and a singular identity.