For Chicago artist Megan Kind, the eyes are really the window to the soul.
That’s clear in her latest piece, a 100-foot-long spray-painted mural under the L tracks on the West Side that she completed in December.
At the center of the giant painting is a woman who appears to find a comfortable resting place against the brick wall. The subject props her head in her hand as her vibrant purple hair flows in the wind and her body rises and falls.
“I look at her . . . as kind of like a landscape,” says Kind, who lives in Humboldt Park and grew up on the South Side.
The curves in the character’s body are inspired by mountains, while the florals in the background give a more obvious nod to nature.
But she’s missing a mouth — a feature that has become a trend in Kind’s work.
“I try to focus on the emotion in the eyes and the body language,” Kind says.
It evokes a feeling Kind says most people are familiar with — when your significant other says nothing’s wrong, but their face tells a different story.
“Everything about you is saying something’s wrong, or there’s a feeling you’re trying to express without words, so that’s kind of what I do with my art.”
If the eyes are a window, hair is the frame in Kind’s work. A hair stylist by day, the 38-year-old plays with different hair textures and styles in her artwork — in this piece the woman’s hair is full yet weightless, like a cloud hovering over the landscape she created.
“Doing hair is an art in itself,” Kind says. “It was very easy to connect the two, because for me doing hair, I like the instant gratification of seeing something evolve and change, and making people happy when I do it.”
“It’s kind of the same thing with art, in a sense, in that I get to watch the process, I get to build.”
Kind wanted this character’s features to be reflective of the community around it.
“I wanted to give back to the neighborhood, because the area, like Lawndale and Little Village, is primarily Black and Hispanic,” Kind says. “I wanted to put a character up there that looked a little more like them and represented them a little more.”
The wall the mural is on belongs to Inside Town (1954 S. Troy St.), a creative space where Kind has her art studio in the North Lawndale neighborhood not far from Little Village.
“This was a little more relaxed because I got to kind of play with it and work with it and let it evolve on my own without any time limits,” Kind says.
Kind’s mouthless figures, and her other fantastical creatures, can be found in murals throughout the city.
A character with cotton candy-like hair helped beautify a once-gritty Pilsen rail viaduct in 2020.
Kind has also shown off her affinity for video games — her take on Donkey Kong was featured on a retaining wall along 49th Street on the South Side, and she contributed to a mural homage to Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter video game characters in Back of the Yards.
Click on the map below for a selection of Chicago-area murals
