Four new murals are lighting up our beautiful city, and the first was completed in early July in 1815 Norwood Court.
I had never heard of Norwood Court, but it is the short, dead-end street along the west side of the tracks, the one that runs from Lyons to Clark Street, accessible by turning east on Ridge Avenue at Clark or from the south on Oak Avenue.
The mural, entitled live INSPIRED, is by artist Molly Z, her mural nickname. (She IS Molly Zakrajsek, actually.)
The composition is abstract shapes in bright colors – the only distraction is a huge bright red Coke Studio billboard behind the electrical wires above the mural. (Who put that there anyway?) The mural was funded by Trulee Co.
Trulee Evanston is the new senior building overlooking the Norwood Court mural. Like several other residential buildings near the tracks, a mural definitely illuminates the residents’ view.
Molly Z has another mural in Evanston on the north side of the Grove Street Viaduct on Elmwood Avenue called Fluent Foundations. The title is an astute reference to the efflorescence that runs through the viaduct walls throughout the city. This mural was painted in 2019 with the help of teenagers from the Fine Arts department at Evanston Township High School.
The “Custer Street Oasis” is getting a shiny new mural on the Metra embankment. Funded by the Main-Dempster Mile, it starts under the Main Street flyover and heads west, up the exit ramp and ending where the trees begin.
The artist, Brett Whitacre, lives in Rockford, but has murals all over Chicago, Milwaukee, Madison, Rockford and 11 in Norwalk, Connecticut, where he was hired to liven up a “dying” mall.
Here in Evanston, he’s working with a college intern, also from Rockford, who needs 200 hours of “anything art related” this summer. Whitacre is even working at night, by the light of a large lamppost on Custer Street.
Whitacre says “I do things that are enjoyable. I’m not very deep – I want most people to like my murals.”
It is spray-painted and uses imported acrylic that is archival and pigment-rich. The ink is made in Barcelona, Spain, but it’s called Montana, of all things. He engraves their shapes before spraying them, in the form of a stencil. A delightful flower garden adjacent to the mural has been planted on the Main-Dempster mile.
Artist Max Sansing is painting a large mural at the turn of the Metra north of Davis Street. It has no name yet, but its theme came to him as he experimented, read, and thought about the past two difficult years and how many people have turned to nature to ease their anxieties. He has researched plants native to Evanston and the painted plants will extend to the lower end of the Metra ladder. Downtown Evanston is funding the mural.
Sansing started by painting graffiti murals with friends. He then attended the American Academy of Art in Chicago. He has been painting murals for over 20 years, worked with the CPAG (Chicago Mural Arts Project) and traveled to Sweden, the Middle East and Puerto Rico to paint them. He says people there meet him when he arrives, and that’s exciting for him.
Your sketch was not projected on the wall, a common way to put up a mural (at night, of course). To enlarge the heads to such a large size, Sansing uses a unique system of landmarks instead of a grid. He says it takes a lot of planning.
There will be a UV coating on the mural when it’s finished, he told me, which helps to maintain the colors over time. Reds, in particular, can fade in the sun, he explained.
Sansing uses the same spray paints that Brett Whitacre uses, although his Montanas are made in Germany, he says. He loves making murals because “the artist has the advantage of making something lasting”. And this one will last longer than usual as it is not a retaining wall with a potential effluent problem.
EMAP, the Evanston Mural Arts Project is the brainchild of Lea Pinsky and Dustin Harris, two Evanston artists. They started painting murals together in 2005, forming a collaboration called Mix Masters.
As such, they spearheaded many large-scale mural projects in Chicago. They also ran the “Mile of Murals” in Rogers Park for seven years, along the CTA Red Line track from Estes Avenue to Pratt Boulevard.
In 2017, Pinsky and Harris created EMAP, specifically to beautify spaces in Evanston with murals. They organized murals here for commercial and private purposes – finding funding, looking for artists and volunteers (sometimes even painting themselves), and overseeing logistics such as legal permissions (often hard to obtain, from Metra and CTA, but “not this way). time,” says Pinsky.) They also handle community coordination, traffic barricades, and Arts Council communication.
Recently, EMAP affiliated with Art Encounter, a 44-year-old organization founded by three Evanston artists and of which Lea Pinsky is now the executive director. Art Encounter is a non-profit organization dedicated to educating, empowering and connecting people through interactive encounters with visual art. They host events, studio visits, hikes, tours and travel programs.
A third mural is planned for the east wall of the building that houses Curt’s Café, but next to Swan Lake Cleaners at 2920 Central Street on the corner of Lincolnwood Drive. The artist will be Beverly Sholo, a mixed media artist and experienced muralist who lives north of Chicago. The design is abstract, inspired by workshops with Curt’s students who expressed an interest in a surreal design that felt like dreaming and traveling. Sholo recently completed an interior mural project at Curt’s Café in Highland Park.
It’s a pleasure to see new artwork popping up in Evanston. It’s certainly been a while.
