Chicago Sees the Light

In If These Walls Could Talk, Unit 3, our groups were tasked to design and create a large scale mural in the new GCE space. In unit 2 we created a sketch of what we wanted for our final mural and over the period of a couple weeks we had edited the mural and worked towards completing the prep work for the mural. We had faced many difficulties throughout the project, mainly the communication and the constant changing of the mural and its meaning over the course of the weeks we worked on it. However, despite these difficulties, our efforts payed off and the mural, although not our original message, turned out great. I'm very proud of all the hard work my group mates and I put into this mural because it turned out to be captivating and expressed our general message: that Chicago is more than it appears. Please enjoy the mural, the video of our progress, and my artist statement below.

   The purpose of our project was to show the many hidden gems of Chicago in order to reflect what we have learned in this course. The mural we created shows multiple different tourists of all shapes and sizes, that span across the length of the wall, walking by three different cracks in the wall that had collages that depict different images that represent the city: culture, art, and buildings. Most people who aren't from Chicago view the city as a corrupt and violent place that only has a few select beauties; such as the Bean, Willis Tower, and the Taste of Chicago. The media and techniques we used to create this mural were spray paint and stencils, used to create the people and cracks, and laser print images with wheat paste, used to put together our collages. The stencils had been created by tracing images onto a paper, via projector, and then adhesive glued onto the chipboard to be cut out. We used original photographs to create the collages, each with its own themes: art, culture and architecture, that were then laser printed to wheat paste into the cracks. We chose the background color of the wall to be grey so as to represent the skyline of Chicago without the skyline actually being there. All of the stencils had been spray painted black in order to stand out against the grey background. The bright eye catching colors come from the collages of the mural, which draws the attention of people to our main purpose: to show that Chicago is more than just violence and corruption. The mural is able to transform and impact the space by making it more visually appealing and by the fact it was created by students. This mural opens the eyes of the viewer to the real Chicago and what it has to offer.

Everyday each group member had a different role, which played a key part in completed the mural. Each member got the chance to partake in each role. There was the mule whose job was to collect all the materials group members needed to complete their tasks for the mural. The documentarian was in charge of taking pictures and videos in order for each member to create the reflection video. The artistic director had to make sure all the work that was done went along with the mural and made sure it was good quality. The last job was the director of operations who was responsible for keeping the other members on task and for cleaning up the messes made during the work time. My favorite role had been the mule because I was quick with the tasks I was assigned making me the perfect person to help assist others with their needs. My least favorite role had been the artistic director because I'm a very indecisive person especially when it comes to art and it is very hard for me to envision a piece that has not been completed or drawn on paper. However, I did understand the importance and need for the role because without it we would not have a a nice looking final mural. If I had the ability to change parts of the process and experience I would want better communication among group members so there would be less confusion and stress for everyone and more time within the new space to work on the mural. I also would want to have it so that we wouldn't have needed to constantly change the looks and message of the mural throughout the whole process and have made all the edits in the very beginning. The final piece did achieve our original goal of showing that Chicago is more than meets the eye while creating a beautiful artwork. However it had not turned out, visually, how we originally pictured it with the skyline idea being completely removed and the addition of people walking by the cracks. Due to our hard work we were able to create a gorgeous artwork that had impacted the space we worked in.