Eddie L. Kornegay III moved to Forest Park from Atlanta in December 2019, excited to find work as a painter and live closer to his dad. There was no way he could have predicted the COVID-19 pandemic that shut down the city three months later.
But Kornegay, 33, was lucky. A friend of his father was looking for a muralist to paint a dozen or so landscapes on buildings that he owned or managed. After everything shut down in March 2020, he commissioned Kornegay. So, the Chicago-area newcomer spent the next eight months working outside, getting to know the city and talking with passers-by about art.
“I was able to do murals from April of 2020 to December of 2020. It was a great time. One of my best years yet,” Kornegay says. “It made you forget about the pandemic, that it was happening.”
One of the murals he painted is a landscape scene that wraps around the corner of an apartment building on the southeast corner of North Wolcott Avenue where West Ainslie Street turns into an alley in Lincoln Square.
There, colorful sunflowers open up before a lush green meadow with a butterfly lifting off into a blue sky with fluffy clouds. The mural wraps around the corner of the building with another sunflower rising next to a downstairs doorway. The sun beams from behind that sunflower’s waving yellow petals.
Kornegay says he was commissioned to paint landscapes, and thought he’d try sunflowers. He drew this one freehand, although he sometimes uses a projector or or other tools muralists use to help scale up his designs to paint them. He draws his mural inspiration from the greenery, insects and animals around the Atlanta home where he grew up.
Kornegay’s artist name is Teddyy Gramm, a “high school nickname that stuck,” he says.
Mike Zucker, who commissioned Kornegay, is manager and partner of Chicago-based Peak Properties, a third-party property management company. He says he wanted murals for the buildings he manages to support local artists and “add a little love” to the neighborhood.
“This was also a pandemic project that we put together in the sense that there was so much negativity going on we thought it would be something unique that we would do,” Zucker says. “Bring a little light to all the misery that was going on.”
The sunflower mural “spruces up the neighborhood. It adds a little light, a little character, a little novelty to a building and it’s something that other building owners don’t do,” Zucker says.
Most of the comments he hears about his buildings’ murals are positive, he says, although some say they might prefer a different flower or color palette.
“No one’s ever saying, ‘why did you put a mural in my neighborhood?’” Zucker said.
Kornegay still paints murals, and works full time doing IT for a company in Buffalo Grove.
He admits his first impressions of Chicago may have been a bit skewed by the pandemic.
“I thought Chicago had no traffic,” he chuckled. “I was like, ‘this is a great place with no traffic on the highways.’”
As it turned out, everyone was inside.
