Arts & Entertainment
Bronzeville Renaissance Mural Depicts Community’s Innovative Past and a Hopeful Future
The Bronzeville Renaissance Mural shines a spotlight on the historic Chicago neighborhood’s vibrant and innovative past while also looking to the future.
It was created by two Chicago artists — Rahmaan “Statik” Barnes and Shawn Michael Warren — with help from students at Bronzeville’s Little Black Pearl High School in 2020.
Located at 38th Street and Michigan Avenue, the mural helps conceal a Commonwealth Edison battery storage facility that is part of the Bronzeville Community Microgrid. ComEd provided funding for the mural.
Read More: Bronzeville Community Microgrid Charts a Path to a Green Energy Future
Warren created the first half of the mural depicting historical figures, while Barnes’ work portrays the possibility of a more hopeful future.
Andre and Frances Guichard, owners of Gallery Guichard in Bronzeville, were consultants on the project.
“The first half depicts the past,” Frances Guichard said, “and it talks about how we had great people in the Bronzeville community and all around who have contributed amazing things.”
Among those depicted are Katherine Johnson, a NASA trailblazer whose calculations of orbital mathematics were critical to the success of early crewed space missions.
Others include activist and journalist Ida B. Wells, poet Gwendolyn Brooks and the late Harold Washington, the first African American to be elected Chicago mayor back in 1983.
The mural also shows the location of the 1919 race riots that occurred in the community following the murder of a young Black man swimming off the 31st Street beach.
“He was hit in the head with a rock because of the division of race — Whites and Blacks did not come together — and he swam past an imaginary line and they didn’t like it,” Frances Guichard said. “So they hit him in the head with a brick and killed him. He drowned. It set off a fury of riots killing many African Americans in the Bronzeville community. And each one of those locations that has an X on it is a mark that symbolizes where those riots mainly took place.”
The second half of the mural depicts Bronzeville’s potential.
“You see faces of young African Americans that represent the future of Bronzeville,” Andre Guichard said. “The blue sky represents the potential of our community … and also the potential of a green economy if we make the proper choices as it relates to global warming.”
He said the mural was created using a technique that involved first painting the images on parachute cloth in studio. That enabled “museum quality” images to be created and also should extend the life of the mural.
The mural was then laid on wood panels before being treated with multiple protective layers.
“This process started in Philadelphia in the ‘70s, and murals from that period are still in existence,” Andre Guichard said. “This will probably be one of the longer-lasting murals you see around Chicago.”
