A mural park is coming to the North Lawndale neighborhood, set to open next summer.
Plans for West Edge Arts were announced Tuesday with the installation of the first mural by Chicago artist Dorian Sylvain, a 50-foot-high abstract piece called “Bring It With You” that will take several days to complete.
Eventually, West Edge Arts, which is located at 3216 W. Ogden Ave., will feature multiple murals — most outside but some indoors as well — on exterior masonry brick walls and perimeter walls of the campus, as well as freestanding walls within the 25,000-square-foot campus.
A 50-foot-tall cylindrical steel beam is the surface for Sylvain’s mural, which she said takes “primary inspiration from textiles, needlework, ceramics, pottery, and woodwork — such as the intricate beadwork of the Potawatomi and the Czech tradition of decorative Easter eggs — recognizing the waves of ethnic and national populations that settled in North Lawndale before expanding throughout Chicago to create a ‘City of Neighborhoods.’”
Some of the murals will be permanent fixtures, while others will rotate in and out “just to keep the place fresh and encourage folks to come out and see what’s there,” said Chelsea Dawkins, who is the senior project lead. “We are intentionally not using the word museum because when you think of a museum, it’s an institution that collects or preserves artwork. And West Edge Arts is an exhibition space with public programming.”
Most of the murals will be painted, she said, offering a mix of figurative and abstract pieces. The mural by Sylvain, who has a mural featured at the Obama Presidential Center, “is a really interesting tapestry of different geometric patterns from different cultures, so that one is not portraiture, which I know is what folks might think when they hear ‘mural.’ But we expect to have a range of artistic expressions.”
Chicago is a city of weather extremes, which will inevitably affect the artworks.
According to Dawkins, “We’ve had a lot of conversations about that and have consulted with muralists who have done this in Chicago for a while, just to learn how to preserve murals and the type of brick that works the best with murals over time and what we would need to do to preserve the art that’s going up.”
Also: “Because Chicago is cold and folks don’t always want to be outside, our building will have floor-to-ceiling glass walls so that people can be inside and still get a beautiful view of the park and the murals even when there are frigid temperatures.”
The goal behind West Edge Arts is to use public art as a point of connection for people across communities.
“Art is a medium that really draws people in and creates possibilities,” said Dawkins. “So we wanted to create a physical destination where neighbors from North Lawndale but also across the city, as well as visitors to Chicago, can come and experience Chicago’s rich culture of murals. We’re also planning on having a cafe in the space, so we are hoping to create a third space for people, whether you’re an artist, a creative or an aspiring artist or just an art enthusiast, you can come and find a community.”
There are also plans for programming, with a range of classes and workshops. There are also discussions about making the space available on a rental basis for events.
The campus will be free and open to the public. All the commissioned artists are being paid for their work and funding for West Edge Arts, which is a nonprofit, has come from individual donors.