Art collector and long-time North Kenwood resident Patric McCoy leaned back against the crossbar of his bicycle and looked across the intersection of E. 41st Place S. Lake Park Ave. “This was the corner where they was dealing the drugs,” he said.
Now the intersection had become home to the Oakland Museum & Garden, a neatly-kept grassy commons exhibiting four larger-than-life sculptures created by the museum’s founder, self-taught sculptor and community artist Milton Mizenburg Jr. Today, about 80 people were gathered in the garden for an honorary street-naming commemorating Mizenburg.
The son of a refrigerator repair business owner, Mizenburg was raised in Harvey, Illinois. After his father passed, he moved to Chicago to pursue art, first to the Back of the Yards neighborhood where he started making jewelry and later to the Oakland neighborhood where he came into his own as a wood sculptor and community artist.
In 1988, when Mizenburg moved into the Oakland neighborhood, it was a bit rough, said McCoy. Drug dealers staked out the empty lots along E. 41st Pl. and the El Rukn gang kept a house just north on Lake Park Ave.
But that didn’t deter Mizenburg, his oldest son, Milton Mizenburg III, told the Herald. The younger Mizenburg remembered his father saying, “You know what, son, the neighborhood doesn’t make me, I make the neighborhood.”
And he did just that. Mizenburg started making sculptures and placing them in vacant lots near his E. 41st Place home. He called this outdoor exhibition of sculptures the Oakland Museum of Contemporary Art.
Mizenburg’s sculptures are larger-than-life, totemic pieces often constructed of large chunks of wood glued or otherwise joined together. The surfaces of the wood chunks are textured by chainsaw cuts and often painted. They echo human form but are clear abstractions. They invite touch, interpretation and discussion.
As soon as he put the sculptures in the vacant lot on the corner of E. 41st St. and Lake Park Ave., the drug dealers stopped selling there, McCoy said. “Most of the people in these communities tend to be really afraid of spirit,” McCoy said. And these pieces “had spirit.”
“So they moved away,” McCoy said.
Yetta Starr and her husband Bob Kempa moved into the neighborhood in 2011 and befriended Mizenburg Jr.. “He wrapped his big personality around his neighbors,” recalled Starr.
Starr, a commercial interior designer, said, “Milton had a remarkable spatial sense in a natural open public setting.”
“We need a bench,” Starr remembered him saying years ago. And it had to be in the “center of the garden.” So he built one. While that bench eventually had to be replaced, Starr ensured that Mizenburg’s legacy would continue.
The corner of Honorary Milton Mizenburg, Jr. and Shirley J. Newsome Ways.
Marc C. Monaghan
“The bench that you see here now,” said Starr pointing at a hand-crafted wood bench, “It’s exactly in the same position where he had set the original bench.” The new bench was built in 2022 with a Shirley J. Newsome grant from the South East Chicago Commission.
After Mizenburg passed in 2016, Starr and Kempa tended to the sculpture garden, got control of the lot, started organizing events, planted a garden and formally renamed the area the Oakland Museum & Garden.
In 2024, they got the museum and garden placed in a land trust through the non-profit Neighbor Space. The trust ensures that the garden will remain a permanently protected public asset.
As the crowd waited for the street sign unveiling, old friends greeted each other and introduced themselves to those they didn’t know. Mizenburg III watched the scene. “My dad always believed that it wasn’t the art,” he said. “It was just getting people – getting people to talk and converse, and that’s what makes a community.”