Chicago murals: People are going nuts over this North Side mural by John Airo
This mural of a squirrel was created by Andersonville artist John Airo.
Robert Herguth / Sun-Times
Forget about this country’s vicious political divide. Andersonville artist John Airo has learned just how aggressively split people are about something that might come across as nuts: squirrels.
He discovered this while painting a mural a few years ago of one of the bushy-tailed rodents on a shop on Montrose Avenue.
He says he’d hear from passersby, “I love squirrels, they’re so funny, so cute.”
“Then,” he says, “there were the haters.”
One time, a car spun by, and one of the young men inside hollered at Airo: “F--- squirrels!”
“I was looking for a text message, figuring it was someone I knew” joking around, Airo says. But, “no one’s confessed to being the guy that yelled that.”
“It was mean, it was guttural. I just had to laugh.”
But it showed him that “squirrels are the divider. I didn’t know that. There are strong opinions.”
Airo’s thoughts on the tree-climbing creatures?
“I think they’re hilarious,” he says.
But the artist — who creates paintings and sculptures and has created a studio in his garage — wasn’t very good at drawing them. That realization indirectly led to the mural.
“I had tried drawing a squirrel, and it looked terrible,” Airo says. “So I kept trying. And they all looked really bad, like weird cats or raccoons.
“I posted a pic of my mediocre squirrels on social media, and my friend Gerri loved them. So every time I would see her, I gave her a bunch of poorly drawn squirrels.”
The friend, Gerri Brunner, ended up writing a children’s book that she says she’s planning to self-publish about a squirrel named Penelope Nutcracker. She asked Airo to illustrate it, prompting him to realize, “I needed to learn how to make a squirrel.”
Once he figured out “they don’t really have necks,” he was set “and finally got it down.”
Around that time, the Greater Ravenswood Chamber of Commerce was commissioning a mural. Airo submitted two ideas — one he thought they’d like and the other, “the squirrel idea,” mostly as a joke.
“They picked the squirrel,” Airo says.
On the left side of the wall is the animal. On the right is a pile of nuts being, well, squirreled away. Scattered among them, a bag of potato chips popular in Ireland called “Taytos” — a nod to the Celtic store Celtica Gifts at 1940 W. Montrose Ave.
The owner says, “I do love squirrels.”
Airo says, “A lot of people don’t I learned while making it.”
Click on the map below for a selection of Chicago-area murals