Blog: Before and After photos

When Humberto Angeles woke up on Thursday morning, he heard a truck outside his Bridgeport apartment. He looked out the window and saw the city's graffiti blasters painting a brick wall across the street. They covered over a mural that Angeles says he rather liked.

ANGELES: What I got from it, it was just a mural for peace. That's what I got out of it. Peace.

The mural was a painting of three Chicago Police Department blue light cameras that you see on light posts in high crime areas. The Chicago Police logo is on the cameras but then the artist also painted Jesus on one post, a deer head on another, and a skull on the third camera. What the mural is supposed to mean is anyone's guess. Angeles agrees that it's a rather inscrutable work of art but he liked it and he says he feels bad for the artist.
 
ANGELES: Spent all that time working on it. Spent like a good two weeks on it.

VILLA: It's roughly 40 feet across by one story, by maybe 12 feet tall.

Gabriel Villa is the artist who spent much of the last two weeks working on the mural. He says he even took a week off work to do it.

VILLA: It's in a really good area in terms of visibility so you get to see if from a good distance.

Villa did the work as part of a local art festival. The mural itself was on private property, on a wall owned by the mother of a festival organizer. Villa says several Chicago Police officers approached him about the work while he painted. He thinks they may have been offended but he says the painting doesn't have an anti-police message.

VILLA: This mural was not a quiz. A lot of contemporary art tries, you know it tries to baffle you, or tries to confuse you, or kind of flip things on its head. I wasn't asking anything.

Villa says he thinks police officers disliked the mural and they called the alderman who ordered the mural to be painted over.

BALCER: Yeah, I'm the alderman here. I was told about it and I okay'd it and I stand by it.

11th ward alderman James Balcer says he called in the graffiti blasters because the owner of the building never got a permit for the mural. He says he got 3 or 4 complaints from residents. He says he got some from police too and he says he agreed that the piece was distasteful.

BALCER: You know I don't know if there was hidden gang meaning behind it with the cross, with the skull, with the deer, with the police cameras. Was there something anti-police about it? I don't know what's in his mind. That's how I viewed it.

MARSZEWSKI: It's really too bad that he didn't know that was art.

Ed Marszewski is the art festival organizer who asked Villa to paint the mural. And it's his mom that owns the building that Villa painted on.
 
MARSZEWSKI: We didn't realize that you need to get a permit to paint your own wall. Do you know if that is in fact a law?

A spokesman for Chicago's buildings department says section 13 25 50 of the City Code requires building owners to have a permit for painted signage or to alter or repair painted signage on a building. But a spokesperson for the city's law department says there's no permit necessary for a mural on the side of a private building as long as it's not an advertisement and as long as the property owner has given their permission.

The department of streets and sanitation which runs the graffiti blasters program sent us a statement saying they removed the mural at the alderman's insistence, and they are quote, "looking at the situation to determine if the removal was the proper course of action." Standing out on the sidewalk, a somewhat defeated Villa looks across the street at the brown wall where his mural used to be.

VILLA: I think that what they did was that they said you know what lets just do it and we'll deal with the consequences but as long as the mural is gone, let's just make it happen and I don't think a city should have that much power.

Villa says he's disappointed that the decision to remove his art was made so quickly, and without notifying him or the building owner.