Mario Mena says he noticed a change among the students taking his street-art class at Yollocalli, the youth outreach arm of the National Museum of Mexican Art. Fewer were coming from the heavily Latino neighborhoods of Pilsen and Little Village. More were coming from the Southwest Side.
So, when he got a chance to paint a mural on a building in Brighton Park, he saw it as a way to give a boost to a community where his students live.
For a few weeks this summer, Mena, who’s a Southwest Side native, worked with his students creating the mural on the building where Cook County Commissioner Alma Anaya’s office is.
It shows kids strumming a guitar, popping an ollie on a skateboard and jumping on flower heads and sending sparkly pollen into the air. Hands appear from the sky, holding a traditional Chicago three-story apartment building, a two-story house and a one-story bungalow like the ones you see all over the Southwest Side.
“We’re trying to create a mural for the youth where they’re from,” Mena says, “something that gives them that public entitlement to their neighborhood, where they can pass by their families and have that story: ‘Hey, I created that over there.’
“We need public spaces for the community where we feel ownership over those spaces,” Mena says. “We wanted to highlight the places we grew up living. We grew up in multi-generational homes where you had three or four families living in one house. I grew up in a bungalow. Nothing encompasses the Southwest Side feeling like the bungalows.”
Mena says he taught his students about how to work with a client on a project and how to plan a mural so it has real meaning. They worked through questions like: What do we want in this piece? What are we trying to say? What’s the story behind it, and what makes that important about it?
They decided to spotlight nature because Brighton Park doesn’t have much public green space, Mena says: “If it’s not attached to a school, we don’t have a place for them to go.”
Anaya says her favorite part of the mural at 4374 S. Archer Ave. are what at first seem to be fluttering dragonflies but, on closer inspection, are glowing, flying books.
As Mena and the kids painted, people from around the neighborhood pulled in to the bank parking lot next door. And, as they watched, the mural took shape.
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