Chicago wasn’t the first city where artist Matthew Mederer shopped his mural of a girl reading on a bookshelf. He already had pitched the idea to a city in the Southwest, with the girl wearing cowboy boots, and to a college, with the girl reading about astrophysics.
But it was in his adopted hometown of Chicago — where the girl is wearing Jordan 1 shoes, a Cubs beanie and a Chicago flag-inspired dress and is lost in Chicago author Audrey Niffenegger’s bestselling novel “The Time Traveler’s Wife” — that he found a home for his mural.
“I thought it was a great idea, and nobody wanted it,” Mederer says.
But Robert Morvay did. Morvay, who’s the community development director for the Lakeview Roscoe Village Chamber of Commerce, says he knew “from the second we first saw it” that Mederer’s mural, titled “The Girl and the City,” would be perfect for the south-facing wall of Central Savings at Ashland, Lincoln and Belmont avenues in Lake View.
“You could see his love for Chicago and where he lives,” Morvay says. “It has this indescribable, iconic feel to it.”
The mural serves as a welcoming gateway for a spot that’s being branded Lake View Center, where Lake View and Roscoe Village converge.
Using spray paint, Mederer did the mural in June.
It’s a few blocks from Anthony Lewellen’s mural that features a woman gazing through binoculars, with sailboats and the Chicago skyline behind her.
Mederer’s mural features the skyline, too, with the sun setting behind the city and the girl as she reads. You can also see other books on her shelf, including Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle,” George A. Larson’s “Chicago Architecture,” Kevin Coval’s “A People’s History of Chicago” and Erik Larson’s “The Devil in the White City” — the first book Mederer read after moving to Chicago from New Jersey in 2011.
“I wanted to celebrate Chicago as a cultural phenomenon,” he says.
Mederer, who lives in Logan Square, says he moved to Chicago from New Jersey after “a girl broke my heart, and I loaded up all my stuff and came to Chicago. I didn’t know anybody here at the time.”
If you look closely, you’ll find some Chicago Easter eggs that Mederer hid in the mural. But he says it’s about more than that: “It’s about making space for yourself and making time for yourself.”
