Chicago murals: Englewood mural features a gallery of portraits

The foundation for one of the newest murals in Englewood was laid a few years ago when the city of Chicago was painting an abandoned rail viaduct along South Racine Avenue.

Crews covered the wall under the tracks with white paint but also mistakenly painted an expansive wall along the tracks south of 58th Street.

“Now, we had a much bigger project in front of us and no funding to do it," says Joe "Cujo Dah” Nelson, co-founder of the Englewood Arts Collective.

The larger white wall, along an empty lot, sat blank.

Finally, earlier his year, Nelson and five other Chicago artists turned the blank wall into a gallery celebrating their love of Englewood. Giant portraits now rise under the old rail line. Vines tumble down from a trestle top, and branches and boughs frame the faces that seem to gaze into the distance.

“We always love being at the wall and looking to your left and your right and seeing someone who’s in it as much as you are,” says Max Sansing, a muralist and friend of Nelson who painted one of the portraits.

Sansing’s portrait includes a woman holding cherry blossom petals. He says those symbolize “the idea of a spark of creativity that can spark another and another and another.”

For his portion of the mural, Jamiah Calvin painted a woman with a helmet emblazoned with the Black Panther Party logo and the words, “Is it safe yet?”

Calvin says he includes that question in much of his art because "we have so much more to go.”

He says the image represents all Black women everywhere and also is dedicated to his aunt and uncle Donna Calvin and Willie Calvin Jr., who were active in the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s with Fred Hampton, who was killed in a police raid.

At one end of the wall, next to a soft edge of ivy, Darius Dennis painted an image of Stokely Carmichael. A New Yorker born in Trinidad, Carmichael helped popularize the term Black power in the early 1960s. He was a confidant of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and marched across the South for civil rights. After witnessing the harassment and assassination of other civil rights leaders, Carmichael changed his name to Kwame Ture and moved to Guinea.

“I had been waiting to paint Kwame for a long time,” Dennis says. “I had the opportunity to paint not only someone who was a Black advocate for civil rights right around the time of Juneteenth, but also June is pride month, and Stokely was openly gay.”

The other artists who worked on the mural were DredSke, Everett Reynolds and Oscar Joyo. Rahmaan Statik is expected to contribute in the future.

“It’s like putting good ingredients in a dish, and you cook it, and you share it with everybody else," Nelson says.