"New Murals Boost West Town"

New murals boost West Town
Chamber of commerce sponsors project

By MICAH MAIDENBERG
Editor

Three new murals are giving the eastern edge of West Town a splash of color and promoting neighborhood identity, according to sponsors of the project.

Special Service Area number 29, a business improvement agency associated with the West Town Chamber of Commerce, is paying for the public art project.

"It helps announce, 'This is West Town,'" said Darci O'Connell, a member of the SSA's public art committee and proprietor of Architrouve, a neighborhood fine arts business, of the murals. "It helps turn this old, empty viaduct into something warm and inviting. It's kind of like a bouquet of flowers."

The new murals cover a concrete wall beneath a train viaduct in approximately the 900 block of W. Chicago Avenue.

One of the murals, painted by Augustina Droze, shows a bicyclist crossing through the oblique intersection of Ogden, Chicago and Milwaukee on a blue sky day as cars navigate the street.

Plamen Yordanov's panel features a noir-like scene of rapid transit riders on the street as the 66 bus - a ubiquitous presence on Chicago Avenue - throttles by.

In Anne Farley Gaines' contribution, neighborhood residents dine outdoors in front of local culinary institutions like Swim Café, West Town Tavern, the Mexican restaurant Tecalitlan and Kasia's, the Polish deli near Chicago and Hoyne.

The murals are bookended by paintings by artist Sarah Lawshe that follow the color scheme and graphic design elements like yellow dots seen on the banners the SSA has hung from neighborhood light poles. Lawshe painted a cluster of young smiling children holding a banner that says, "West Town is Our Town."

Matthew Westfallen, the special service area's program manager, said the public art committee put out a mural request for proposals in January 2009, hoping to find artists living in the 60622 area code, which covers much of the neighborhood, to paint the walls.

The request was later expanded to include all of Chicago, and three artists were chosen last April. The murals were all completed by September. Phase one cost $11,000.

The next two phases will cover another wall beneath the viaduct at 800 N. Lessing, and then on the sides of privately owned buildings in the neighborhood, which have not yet been identified.

Westfallen said the mural project should give West Town, with its diverse collection of ethnic groups and micro-communities, more definition.

"If you're standing on the bridge, east of Halsted," and outside the neighborhood, he said, "you're in a different area."

With the murals, "You can look up and say, 'I'm in West Town.'"

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