South Sider creates ‘photo murals’ of artistic icons from Chicago’s black community

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks died in 2000, but her presence still looms over the South Side, where she lived and produced some of her most important work.

A “photo mural” of Brooks as a young adult — holding a copy of her acclaimed, 1945 poetry collection “A Street in Bronzeville” — was unveiled earlier this year on a building at 43rd Street and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.

The image is more than an homage to a woman who, as one retrospective of her work put it, “illustrated the beauty and hardships of African American life on the South Side.”

It’s part of a larger vision of artist Chris Devins, who has made it his mission to beautify South Side neighborhoods by creating these kinds of murals while also showcasing and celebrating the area’s African American culture, past and present.

Other murals from Devins, a Hyde Park native, feature famed pianist and singer Nat King Cole (a photo mural at 43rd Street and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive) and writer Lorraine Hansberry (a more traditional mural that he commissioned and Jeff Zimmermann painted at 51st Street and Calumet Avenue). Cole and Hansberry, both dead for many years, had deep Chicago ties.

“I’m not trying to live in the past, but sometimes you can’t get where you’re going unless you know where you’ve been,” Devins says, adding, “The South Side still has a lot of local flavor to play with.”

Current artists with South Side roots, including singer Jennifer Hudson and rapper Common, are the subjects of other Devins photo murals, on buildings along 79th Street in Chatham.

Not all of his images focus on the famous.

For instance, his “Black Girl Magic” photo mural at 60th Street and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive features a woman standing in front of a leafy bush, arms by her side, palms open.

At 104th Street and Maryland Avenue, Devins created a photo mural of black rail workers and their pioneering labor leader to decorate the outside of the National A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum, which focuses on Pullman porters, who hold an important place in Chicago history and, more broadly, black history.

Devins, who’s an urban planner in addition to being a well-known artist, doesn’t like to talk in detail about how he creates his signature photo murals. Generally, he says, he uses wheat-based paste to “wrap” images onto structures, mixing the paste in a way that can make a mural last as little as six months or as much as years, depending on the nature of a project and the goals of a building’s owner.

Earlier this year, he was putting a mural on a building at 68th Street and Halsted Street that he thought was abandoned. Someone saw him working and called the owner.

Devins sent a photo of the mural in progress to the owner, who he says liked it and told him, “Just move it to the front of the building.”

Click on map below for a selection of Chicago-area murals