Chicago murals: Pilsen ‘Libertad’ mural restoration by Ruth Garcia at Barrett Park adds brighter colors

The newly vibrant public work of art is titled “Libertad” and features faces of people the teenage volunteers who helped create it in 2008 saw as faces of freedom.

Ruth Garcia, 21, lived near Barrett Park near Pilsen until, when she was around 5, her family moved to Cicero.

“My mom would take me to that park to play,” Garcia says. “Back then, it was very simple. It wasn’t as colorful as it is now.”

She had a big part in making that happen. Garcia, an art student at Morton College, was one of two artists, with Alondra Sepulveda, hired last summer to restore an iconic but aging mural that lines a wall at the park at 2022 W. Cermak Rd.

Titled “Libertad” — freedom in Spanish — it features historical figures including Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, Mahatma Gandhi, Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, union leader Cesar Chavez and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

The mural originally was painted in 2008 and involved the After School Matters nonprofit and the Yollocalli Arts Reach, a youth program affiliated with Chicago’s National Museum of Mexican Art.

As part of that effort, about a dozen high school students helped lead artist Jesus “Chucho” Rodriguez, who “taught the teens the history and tradition of mural-making and graffiti art, and the students were encouraged to incorporate what they learned into the Barrett Park mural,” according to the Chicago Park District.

Late Mexican artist Frida Kahlo is shown in part of the “Libertad” mural in Barrett Park.

“The whole point is it speaks to our freedom,” says Yollocalli’s Vanessa Sanchez, with those who are pictured being “leaders the young people felt represented freedom to them.”

Over the years, though, weather and wear left the mural faded and chipped.

“Libertad” — Spanish for “freedom” — is painted in the mural. That’s the mural’s title.

“It was not taken care of,” Sanchez says.

So her group hired Garcia, who works at the museum’s gift shop, and Sepulveda to touch up the artwork, giving it a vibrancy they hope will last another generation.

A span of the Barrett Park mural before it was restored last summer.

Garcia had seen photos of the mural from 2008.

“But, when we got there, it was different,” she says. “The colors were mostly faded. Most of the faces of the people in the mural were scraped off.”

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is among the people pictured in the “Libertad” mural at Barrett Park that was restored in 2022. — The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is among the people pictured in the “Libertad” mural at Barrett Park that was restored last year.

So the artists took paint chips from the wall to a paint store to match the shades.

Also, Garcia says, “We amped up the color a little bit more to make it brighter. It took us basically three months, the whole summer, June, July and a little bit of August.”

They left another mural, done at the park fieldhouse in 2016 by artist Chris Silva, untouched.

A mural at Barrett Park’s fieldhouse that Chicago artist Chris Silva painted in 2016.

Sanchez says her group views itself as a “steward” for Barrett Park, where Yollocalli put up its first mural in the late 1990s.

“It’s a small fieldhouse and a small park” — 0.68 acres, according to the park district, with an outdoor basketball court, a playground and a grassy patch — “but it’s special to the neighborhood,” Sanchez says.

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