The images in this Berwyn mural are vintage sci-fi – from alien spaceships and a shrieking woman horrified by something in the sky to characters from the old ”Planet of the Apes” movies.
But ... just what is that oddly shaped brown object surrounded by a yellow and green fluorescent glow, shooting a laser beam?
“That’s a giant chicken wing,” says Daryl Harris, the artist who painted the mural on the side of Cigars & Stripes BBQ Lounge at 6715 Ogden Ave. in the near west suburb.
You see, Harris says, the chicken on the menu at that bar/restaurant/cigar lounge, whose owner commissioned him to do the artwork in 2022, is pretty darn good.
Okay, but poultry aside, what’s going on in this painting?
Harris says it’s something of an homage to films and TV shows about aliens and monsters.
He loves the old-school horror and outer space genres, and so does Cigars & Stripes owner Ronnie Lottz, whose establishment often plays those kinds of movies for customers, including “The Exorcist” on Halloween, when a pea soup special is on the menu.
They’ve been pals for a while, and 10 years or so back Lottz asked Harris, knowing he’s an artist, to recreate a life-sized model of a mummy that was something of a fixture in the bar but deteriorating.
Harris obliged, but then the friends lost touch for awhile as Harris moved from the immediate area.
In the meantime, somebody made off with the mummy.
When Harris happened back into the bar a year and a half ago, Lottz had just found the stolen mummy displayed outside a Halloween-themed store and re-patriated it to his business.
Lottz quickly floated a new idea: for Harris to paint a mural, with aliens, on the side of the building.
“It’s like fate had him do the wall,” Lottz says, adding that this spring there might be an addition to that space: the likeness of iconic Chicago horror film host Svengoolie.
This painting is the subject of this week’s ”Murals and Mosaics” feature in the Chicago Sun-Times.
In July we wrote about the mysterious penguin paintings popping up around the North Side.
We found one under DuSable Lake Shore Drive, near Briar Street.
More were discovered on an underpass at Diversey Harbor.
I stumbled upon another cluster of the cute little birds at Oakdale and Broadway avenues recently. They appear to have been there awhile, but either way, they were too fun to pass up and not include here.
Shifting from little creatures to giant ones, above is one of two bronze sculptures of bison in Humboldt Park that have roots in the 1893 Columbian Exposition that was held in Chicago.
The same guy that designed the lions outside the Art Institute of Chicago, artist Edward Kemeys, designed these creatures, which have been on display at that spot, west of Humboldt Drive and north of Division Street, for just about a century, according to the Chicago Park District.
The lions get a lot of the attention, but these “buffalo” are quite a sight as well.
I visited Milwaukee over the holidays to visit family and watch Creighton play Marquette in men’s basketball.
While there, I spun around downtown a little, passing by the giant mural of Milwaukee Bucks superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo that we featured last summer and was completed by Cicero’s Mauricio Ramirez.
I also spotted a sculpture by Milwaukee’s City Hall that’s worth sharing.
Created by British artist Tony Cragg, it’s called ”Mixed Feelings,” and rises 18 feet into the air.
Made of bronze, “The piece features two intertwining towers,” according to one account. “As the viewer circles the piece, human profiles can be spotted in the sculpture.”
From my vantage, it resembled a couple stacks of pennies about to tumble.
I generally steer away from murals that serve as advertisements, but c’mon, how I could avoid including an image of rats as seen above?
The painting is on the side of an exterminating business on 4445 W. Belmont Ave., and it is awesome, with the artwork done by the WASP Crew, according to the crediting on the building and Instagram.
The rat holding the no-people sign is classic.
