Chicago artist is elevating the humble hot dog stand to fine art

Claude Monet had his water lilies, Vincent van Gogh his sunflowers and Andy Warhol his Campbell’s Soup cans.

Chicago artist Julia Hagen’s muse has led her to that most cherished of Chicago still-life subjects: the hot dog.

Well, not the hot dog itself but the architecture surrounding it.

In her tiny, home studio in Logan Square, Hagen, 28, is painting hot dog stands — transforming the humble hut, with its sometimes garish and mostly neon decor, into oases of nostalgic warmth.

Hagen started last year, and she can’t stop.

Nor would her tens of thousands of social media followers want her to.

“I now have a list of 50-plus hot dog stands that people want me to paint,” Hagen says. “I’ll keep going until I don’t want to do it anymore — or I don’t want to eat another hot dog.”

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times  and  Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Sun-Times

Hagen, a graduate of the School of Art Institute of Chicago, came to the public’s attention in a big way two years ago when she painted a bird’s-eye view of downtown at night in which the streets and expressways are transformed into intersecting ribbons of gold.

That painting, titled “All of the Lights,” drew 10 million viewers to Instagram.

That’s when Hagen decided to drop into city neighborhoods to focus on hot dog stands.

“Everyone has had a hot dog — or, at least, if you live in Chicago, you should have had a hot dog by now,” she says. “They’re not expensive. Very accessible.”

Wenc Photo LLC and Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Sun-Times
 and  Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Sun-Times

Hagen’s paintings of Wolfy’s, Superdawg Drive-In and Gene & Jude’s are online conversation-starters — for the skill she brings to them and the memories the paintings evoke.

“That’s the winner right there!” an Instagram viewer posted of the Gene & Jude’s painting. “The fries are worth the trip.”

By the way, some surely will note the famous real-life discrepancy in the establishment’s name on its signage.

“I used to live down the street and went here way too often,” a Reddit user wrote about Hagen’s rendition of Flub A Dub Chub’s Hot Dog and Burger Emporium. “I love this place and that neighborhood so much! Such a beautiful painting.”

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

The paintings allow Hagen to indulge her love of light. There’s the warm golden glow of streetlights and the chilly flare of blue neon that you see in her Superdawg painting. She says she blends hundreds of acrylic paints to get the range of light just right.

When she was working on some outdoor tables in her Superdawg piece, she says it took an entire day to get the pink neon light’s glow on the table the way she wanted it.

“It’s in the foreground,” she says. “It has to be good.”

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

Her paintings are nostalgic but not in a kitschy, Norman Rockwell sort of way. There are no grinning tykes spilling ketchup on their britches, mouths bulging with food. The hot dog stands take center stage — but they share the spotlight with the apartments above, the L tracks, a psychic’s shop next door, the gangways.

“I liked the idea of there being little hidden gems in there that you can discover the more you look at it,” Hagen says.

She calls her work “whimsical” and “dreamy” and typically sells her prints for $100 to $150 and the originals for $450 to $650.

As a student, Hagen says she’d wander through the Art Institute of Chicago during class breaks, admiring Monet’s haystacks and Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks.”

“Those two influences are pretty strong in my work,” she says. “Something between Monet and Hopper.”

But hot dog stands — would she be OK if, when the time comes, her obituary describes her as the hot dog stand artist?

“I’ll be happy about it, honestly,” she says.

And she has an opening line to suggest for the obit, too: “She died a Chicagoan.”

See more of Hagen’s work online at juliahagenartist.com.

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times  and  Julia Hagen