A Mosaic of Murals Spring to Life in South Loop
New murals painted across barren walls in the South Loop this season all tell different stories about the city.
Collin van der Sluijs, 36, an artist from Maastricht, Netherlands, spent 11 days and almost 10 hours every day painting the wall near a parking lot on South Michigan Avenue.
“I want to paint something for the city. And when I leave, it will stay,” van der Sluijs said. The 78-foot-tall masterpiece, “From Doom to Boom,” features a giant red-headed woodpeckers and a yellow headed blackbird — both on the list of the endangered species in Illinois.
Classic, mid-tone colors create a vintage feeling on the brick wall and flow naturally across the windows. The two vivid birds and freestyle painting of the dream-like flowers and branches make a great connection between the buildings and south Grant Park across the street.
“I like nature on the building. It’s like the complete opposite,” van der Sluijs said. “Also the birds are painted on a large scale, so humans are small compared to the painting. I turned the situation around: small people, big birds.” The mural carries van der Sluijs’s hope that these vanishing species will shine again some day.
Putting on an earphone for some music, van der Sluijs stepped on the lifter and operated it to go up. Once in a while, he would come down and check the mural from a distance. For such a huge mural, he used 60 spray cans and 10 buckets of paints. First he sketched, then filled in the big shapes, and added some darkness and shade. Working larger than life takes time and effort.
“Murals are more common in Europe. People here are not so used to it yet. But they are really taking you [in] with an open arm,” The mural attracted many passersby. “It has the similar function as a park. People will enjoy it if you do it right. City needs some colors,” van der Sluijs said.
“From Doom to Boom” is one of the 18 new mural installations in the South Loop in May, as part of the Wabash Arts Corridor (WAC) initiative first launched in 2013. The heart of WAC extends along Wabash Avenue from Van Buren Street to Roosevelt Road. The corridor is framed to the east by Michigan Avenue and to the west by State Street, which are like the extending spines of the Columbia College Chicago campus.
Columbia launched the idea to push art students out to the streets to create the work to mark the campus, the concept of WAC gradually involved. Now it has managed to expand the mural arts to more living urban canvases and to involve everyone in the district where there are numerous empty walls.
“Arts are not confined to galleries and museums,” said Mark Kelly, Vice President for Student Success at Columbia College Chicago, who also chairs the WAC Committee. “We tend to relegate art work of any form that has a special place, in a museum or in a frame. And here’s a huge wonderful work right in the middle of our lives. I think people just love it and get excited about it.”
Working with several local galleries, WAC brought together students, alumni and artists in Chicago and from all around the world. The building owners covered the cost, including the material, the lift and the commission for the artists. These new installations bring the total number of public art pieces in the district to nearly 40. The number will continue to grow for more new ones will be installed in the coming summer, including a giant 21-storey installation.
This intensity of the mural installations in the downtown area is unique in Chicago. These visual stories reshape the landscape of the area and create an artistic ambience around the parking lots, hotels, restaurants, colleges and cultural entities, making the South Loop a hub of mural art.
Chicago has the tradition of mural. “In certain parts, it’s prevalent. But not in downtown,” said Czr Prz, a Chicago native with more than 20 years of experience as a street artist and has been painting murals in Chicago and different cities in Europe. “They are now much more accepting of it and actually respectable of it.”
Prz’s gigantic mural on South Wabash Avenue stretches 130 feet wide and 20 feet tall, dominated by deep violets and maroons. “It’s about the children of Chicago. They are the future. It’s about making sure we take care of the next generation better. The future is little bit cloudy since we don’t know what’s going on with the finance that is happening here in the city,” Prz said.
Though he has a message, Prz didn’t give the mural a title, expecting that this can leave some space for interpretation by a larger audience who would bring their own eye and have their own understanding. “Like other forms of art, you can take the piece for what it is. If you feel something from it, that’s what you take from it. Even it is different from what I am trying to say,” Prz said. “There’s no buffer for it. People say what they want to say.”
Murals are in open space and have unusual sizes. People can walk right by them and enjoy them from afar. “Murals are for everyone. It’s not like just in someone’s home or in a museum. They are much larger. Everyone can see them,” Prz said.
For artists like Tara Zanzig, painting murals gives artists “a profound feeling” of being outside and creating works of art that easily engage people. She has been attracted to working large scale since she was a teenager. Once she started doing mural art, she instantly fell in love. This time, after nearly 140 hours of concentration on the wall, she hopes her work will “bring a good vibe to the area.” With urban and architectural motifs, the mural asks, “Who do you love?”
Van der Sluijs always puts deep thought into his work in order to make the painting perfectly fit with the spot. Before he starts to paint on the wall, he does research about the place to find elements of imagery and history that he can incorporate. And then he will take all this information and mold it into his own imaginary world and visual language.
People who pass by the mural or park their cars in the parking lot will stop and stare, and tell him how beautiful the mural is, he said. And of course you meet all different kinds of people during the process of working in public space.
“People who live in the area, young and old, a guy from a night shop, a taxi driver, lawyer, you name it all and you meet people on the street,” van der Sluijs said. “And sometimes you have contact with them 10 or 15 years later, and you are connected by something you love to do. So all those visitors have their own story about the wall and share it, so the wall gets his own life.”
And for people in the city, these murals “remind us of how important creative work is to all of us as we push it into the public sphere,” said Kelly.
“Compared to a lot of world cultural capitals and I think Chicago is one of those, we are way behind,” Kelly said the city has its conservative part, but things are gaining momentum here. “We did 18 walls just in the last two weeks. There is no way in 2013 that there were 18 walls available to us.”
The streetside museum of murals draws different people to visit. As they take photos and share them on the social media, more people start to embrace this new way of framing the urban experience, which makes it easier to sell the idea to the wall owners. “I hope this inspires other building owners and artists,” Kelly said.
