{"id":588109,"date":"2026-04-16T17:14:14","date_gmt":"2026-04-16T17:14:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/588109\/"},"modified":"2026-04-16T17:14:14","modified_gmt":"2026-04-16T17:14:14","slug":"public-art-that-isnt-chicago-reader","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/588109\/","title":{"rendered":"Public art that isn\u2019t – Chicago Reader"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chicago takes its public art seriously. The murals and installations we have on view represent us, our communities, our values\u2014from the Haymarket Memorial in the West Loop to Alexander Calder\u2019s iconic Flamingo to Kerry James Marshall\u2019s gorgeous mural on the side of the Chicago Cultural Center. After Casa Aztlan was whitewashed by developer City Pads<\/a> in 2017, the community backlash was so quick and so strong that Ray Patl\u00e1n and other artists were promptly hired to paint a new mural. When a mural by artist Gabriel Villa was commissioned on private property<\/a> in Bridgeport\u2014and then quickly graffiti blasted by the city at the request of then-alderman James Balcer\u2014the local and national art communities widely condemned the censorship, leading to coverage from WBEZ and the Huffington Post, among other outlets.<\/p>\n

So it should come as no surprise that a recent mural of the late Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska, painted at the behest of Ireland-born, Bay Area\u2013based tech entrepreneur Eoghan McCabe, has received a fair amount of scrutiny. Completed in January, the mural is located at 2415 W. Montrose, in North Center. It\u2019s part of a nationwide effort spearheaded by McCabe called Remember Iryna<\/a>, which is funding similar murals across the country.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The 23-year-old Zarutska, who had emigrated to the U.S. in 2022, was killed in August 2025 during a random attack on a light-rail in North Carolina. She had no ties to Chicago. McCabe, 42, is one of the founders of an AI-powered help-desk platform called Intercom. Like other young tech founders, he has a tendency to shitpost on social media. (Sample tweets include: \u201cIt is the duty of men to protect society, to kill the monsters and create a world where all good people can be well,\u201d and \u201cIt feels like almost every day now a violent crime on the tiny island of Ireland occurs where \u2018the suspect\u2019s nationality is not allowed to be made public.\u2019 Everyone knows what that means.\u201d)<\/p>\n

He posted frequently about Zarutska\u2019s tragic death after surveillance video of her attack was released, and it became a rallying point for the far-right to condemn the criminal justice system. (Her attacker, DeCarlos Brown Jr., had a history of prior arrests.) McCabe put out a call on X<\/a>, asking for donations to fund a series of murals of Zarutska, which led to a $1 million pledge from Elon Musk. The murals started appearing late last year, in cities like New York and Miami, and then in Chicago.<\/p>\n

Community response was quick and veered negative. In March, the North Center mural was vandalized\u2014and it wasn\u2019t the first time. It\u2019s not unheard of for murals in our city to memorialize the dead\u2014but those tributes are usually requested by locals, and painted by them, too. (Zarutska\u2019s mural was painted by SAV45<\/a>, an artist based in Spain.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

What distinguishes the murals that Chicago holds most dear is the process that made them\u2014one rooted in community engagement. Remember Iryna is totally devoid of community involvement and thus worth examining further. Should we even consider such a project public art?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Chicago\u2019s abundance of murals can be traced back to the Wall of Respect, the now-iconic 1967 mural that honored heroes of the Black community\u2014people whose importance, according to historian Rebecca Zorach, \u201cwas undervalued by mainstream white culture.\u201d<\/p>\n

Located on the side of a corner store at 43rd Street and Langley Avenue in Bronzeville, the Wall of Respect was the work of a group of Black American artists from the Organization for Black American Culture (OBAC, pronounced o-ba-see). It featured more than 50 notable Black figures, from Malcolm X to Muhammad Ali to Gwendolyn Brooks. \u201cA mural about the black American experience was not exactly a novelty,\u201d former Reader writer Jeff Huebner wrote<\/a>, in one of several articles on the artists and the mural movement they spawned. But the \u201cWall of Respect was the first outdoor mural done for the community\u2014for everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"AThe Wall of Respect helped spur the community mural movement.
Courtesy Georg Stahl Mural Collection\/University of Chicago Library<\/p>\n

Its community engagement was done on the fly. William Walker, one of the mural artists, secured permission from the business owner and spoke with local community members to gain approval. And while surely not every person living near the corner at the time supported the Wall of Respect, it\u2019s clear that plenty of people took pride in it. Local kids offered tours of it; neighborhood street gangs kept a watchful eye on it. In Zorach\u2019s book, Art for People\u2019s Sake: Artists and Community in Black Chicago, 1965\u20131975, she recounts a recollection from artist Jeff Donaldson, \u201cPeople feel better when they walk by there, and we made it so.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Wall of Respect was a sort of early kind of experiment in that respect, where the methods and practices [of community engagement] hadn\u2019t been fully developed,\u201d said Zorach, who coauthored a book on the mural with Abdul Alkalimat and Romi Crawford. Zorach notes that the nature of mural painting easily lends itself to a collaborative process between artists and passersby. \u201cVery often, just because of the way that it has to be done\u2014with artists working outside on the street and people walking by\u2014there\u2019s going to be conversation, and there\u2019s going to be questions, and there\u2019s a sort of communication and collaboration that develops out of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Wall of Respect\u2019s impact was fast and powerful. In 1968, Huebner writes<\/a>, a similar mural was commissioned in Detroit, and Black pride murals followed in Boston, Saint Louis, and Philadelphia. The community mural movement, as it became known, laid the groundwork for much public art that exists today: art that tells community history, depicts important cultural figures, or portrays an uplifting narrative about a people or neighborhood. Community buy-in was a crucial component of that, whether that meant a local group commissioned a work, its subject matter was publicly discussed or voted on, or community members otherwise had some opportunity to share their desires for a work.<\/p>\n

Janice Bond, the executive director of the Chicago Public Art Group, explained that many of her organization\u2019s projects seek to engage the community, which could mean people who live around the proposed site or a demographic that the artwork intends to represent. \u201cWe are creating art with community, not for community,\u201d Bond said. \u201cCommunity engagement varies from project to project in different degrees. The important part for us is that it happens, and that there is at least some sort of opportunity for the community to be heard, especially if it is content of a sensitive nature.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of times I\u2019ve walked away from projects if there isn\u2019t a community buy-in.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sam Kirk<\/p>\n

Sam Kirk is a Little Village\u2013based artist whose artwork can be found throughout the city. They painted La Villita Skate Park; spearheaded Las Puertas de Paseo Boricua in Humboldt Park; helped create The Love That I Vibrate, on the side of Howard Brown Health Center in Northalsted; and the I Am Logan Square mural at Kedzie and Milwaukee, among many other projects.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For Kirk, community engagement is crucial. \u201cA lot of times I\u2019ve walked away from projects if there isn\u2019t a community buy-in,\u201d they said. The level of community engagement depends on the project\u2014whether it\u2019s a public or private commission, and on the subject matter. But most of Kirk\u2019s work focuses on social justice issues, \u201cso community buy-in is extremely important.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cUsually when the conversation happens, we\u2019re not really talking about the design of the mural. We\u2019re having a conversation about: What are the challenges in the neighborhood, what are the things that you\u2019re facing?\u201d Kirk said. \u201cThat helps me to understand what the mural could help to spark other conversations or convey about the people that we\u2019re trying to depict, or the histories and stories we\u2019re trying to share in the piece.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kirk points to their 2021 mural, Stronger Together, led by the Little Village organization New Life Centers, which sought to ease racial tension in the neighborhood following the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent uprisings, as a perfect example of a community-led project. \u201cThe mural was a part of a larger community project that\u2019s still actually running, to unite north and south Lawndale,\u201d Kirk said. \u201cThere were workshops and healing circles, and different community engagement programs, like just basketball, to bring youth from Little Village and North Lawndale together, to do fun things, to build upon joy together.\u201d<\/p>\n

Local nonprofits brought neighborhood youth together to meet with Kirk and discuss what a united north and south Lawndale would look like. The massive, colorful mural depicts young people dancing to a mariachi band and playing basketball; people carry groceries or wear their work uniforms; a man sells paletas below an image of a child holding a \u201cBlack and Brown United\u201d sign. \u201cThe mural is really a reminder of working together as one community, one Lawndale,\u201d Kirk said.<\/p>\n

\"AThe second iteration of the Casa Aztlan mural
Courtesy Latinx Murals of Pilsen<\/p>\n

Longtime Chicago graffiti artist Flash ABC concurs that the permission walls he has managed through the years have all been community-driven. \u201cThere\u2019s always a planning meeting,\u201d he said. The permission walls are primarily places for up-and-coming graffiti writers to practice. Flash manages a Google calendar to organize how long pieces stay up and who is on deck to do the work. In his past project, Project Logan, pieces typically stayed up for two weeks; in the more recent Project Logan 2.0, paintings stay up for around three months. Flash does all this work out of love for the community; he has never been paid for it, and he continues to do so despite losing his day job a few months ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I feel I do with Project Logan, and what this has done is that it gives these people a place to practice, and that\u2019s really where I stand, where I don\u2019t censor anybody,\u201d he said. \u201cThe only time I really have censored anybody is because I don\u2019t like political things. They were going to put up something about Trump, and it wasn\u2019t me; it was a community of people that were there that day and said, \u2018No, you\u2019re not going to paint that,\u2019 because it was just like a political message. So the artist did change his perspective, because he saw that his own community doesn\u2019t want that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"AThe original Casa Aztlan mural
Courtesy UIC<\/p>\n

Flash ABC has overseen a fair number of memorials honoring people important to the hip-hop world. In 2016, Project Logan paid homage<\/a> to Malik Taylor, aka Phife Dawg, from A Tribe Called Quest. A 2014 tribute<\/a> to the late house DJ Frankie Knuckles had a long run on a Logan Square wall. Flash also oversaw a 2017 memorial<\/a> to local hip-hop artist Mike \u201cMic One\u201d Malinowski. Not every tribute that goes up is for a Chicagoan, but all are homegrown, significant to locals in some way. \u201cWe\u2019ve done more memorials than we have done political messages, and that\u2019s kind of where I like where the artist goes is where they pay tribute to somebody who\u2019s even alive or not alive. Focus on the positive, because everybody else is doing the political,\u201d Flash said.<\/p>\n

So what does the Remember Iryna project purport to accomplish? Is it an earnest public art project that makes sense in Chicago? A dog whistle meant to manipulate the political discourse around the criminal justice system, doubling down on racist narratives about victims and perpetrators of crime? A right-wing PR stunt intended to force liberals into advocating for the censorship of free speech? Remember Iryna is not a grassroots memorial; more so, it is a political campaign funded by men who have been explicit about their ideological goals.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Footage of Zarutska\u2019s tragic murder was released on September 5, 2025, a few weeks after her attack. The surveillance video quickly went viral, helping to fuel the ongoing Republican narrative about the supposed \u201csurge\u201d in violent crime. As the New York Times reported<\/a>, \u201cThe outrage over the Charlotte killing is a part of a pattern in which President Trump and his allies highlight horrific crimes to bolster their case that the country is plagued by \u2018American carnage,\u2019 . . . despite statistics that show crime is dropping.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Remember Iryna is not a grassroots memorial; more so, it is a political campaign funded by men who have been explicit about their ideological goals.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Elon Musk was part of this outrage, tweeting<\/a> several times<\/a> about the murder and the supposed lack of coverage in the mainstream media. On February 24, President Trump included several misconceptions about Zarutska\u2019s death in his State of the Union speech<\/a>, helping to perpetuate racist lies. \u201cAbove all, unleashing America\u2019s promise requires keeping our community safe. We have made incredible strides, yet dangerous repeat offenders continue to be released by pro-crime Democrat politicians again and again,\u201d he said, before pointing out Zarutska\u2019s mother in the audience. \u201cLast summer, 23-year-old Iryna was riding home on the train when a deranged monster who had been arrested over a dozen times and was released through no-cash bail stood up and viciously slashed a knife through her neck and body. . . . She had escaped a brutal war only to be slain by a hardened criminal set free to kill in America\u2014came in through open borders.\u201d<\/p>\n

In fact, DeCarlos Brown Jr., the man charged with her killing, was a Charlotte native. And though he had a long history of arrests, he was not freed due to any Democratic attempt at lenient sentencing. He was incarcerated while former North Carolina governor Roy Cooper\u2014a Democrat\u2014was negotiating a deal to release a number of nonviolent offenders during the pandemic, but the Assembly reports<\/a> that Brown had already been released before the agreement went into effect.<\/p>\n

The larger issue was that Brown had a diagnosis of schizophrenia, which was often untreated as his family struggled to secure him long-term care. This problem is hardly unique to Brown. According to a 2022 survey from the National Council for Mental Wellbeing<\/a>, 42 percent of U.S. adults who said they needed mental health treatment in the previous 12 months didn\u2019t receive it due to costs or other barriers. As Pew has reported<\/a>, less than half of people with serious mental illness, like schizophrenia, are receiving care: \u201cMany receive treatment only in jails or prisons, which have become the de facto institutions for people with [severe mental illness] because we no longer have sufficient public hospital beds for them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump and his proxies have painted Brown as less than human. McCabe, for his part, shared several horrific screenshots of the attack on his X account, calling Brown a \u201cmonster.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

McCabe launched his mural campaign in September, just days after the video of Zarutska\u2019s murder was released. Murals started popping up last year\u2014in Washington, D.C., New York, LA, and then Chicago. Some of the artists and businesses who have participated in the mural project thus far have either denied any knowledge of the founder\u2019s political leanings or tried to argue that the work wasn\u2019t political. Ben Keller, an artist who painted murals of Zarutska in Washington, D.C., and New York City, told the Tribune<\/a> that he \u201ctries to stay away from the political noise because it can taint the murals\u2019 message.\u201d In Providence, the owners of a bar where a mural was slated to appear wrote in a statement that it was \u201cnever intended to be political<\/a>.\u201d The artist involved, Ian Gaudreau, said his artwork<\/a> was \u201cmeant to combat the idea of it being used for a political agenda.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet it takes just a cursory glance at McCabe\u2019s X account to ascertain his political motivations. Among tweets praising Musk and Trump are racist and xenophobic remarks like, \u201cOne of the great sorrows of my life has been watching my beautiful home country of Ireland be destroyed by its own unfettered immigration policy. As of the end of last year there were 1.2M immigrants out of a total population of 5.38M.\u201d The Chicago Reader\u2019s requests for comment from McCabe and Musk went unanswered.<\/p>\n

The local Ukrainian population has also been divided on the mural. Halyna Parasiuk, an archivist at the Ukrainian National Museum of Chicago, told the Sun-Times<\/a> that \u201cit\u2019s good to keep this memory of this innocent girl.\u201d Ukrainian artist Aliona Solomadina, who fled Ukraine in 2022, wrote in an email to the Reader that the tragedy \u201chas been politicized within the American context,\u201d noting that Zarutska was not attacked for being Ukrainian or a refugee, but \u201csimply because she was sitting near the attacker.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom my perspective as an artist and designer, the mural as a medium isn\u2019t appropriate for this story, especially given this politicization,\u201d she wrote. \u201cThere are many other ways to support Ukrainian refugees, such as providing jobs or donating to volunteer organizations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mariya Dmytriv-Kapeniak, president of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America Illinois chapter, told the Sun-Times<\/a> that she is in communication with Zarutska\u2019s community in North Carolina, and that the family had not granted permission to use Zarutska\u2019s likeness.<\/p>\n

Knowing the hate-filled rhetoric behind the project, it\u2019s hard to argue that Remember Iryna is a sincere attempt at memorializing her life. Nor does it merit an earnest conversation about free speech or the value of public art. It doesn\u2019t hold a candle to the murals in our city that were forged in a participatory manner, that seek to tell people\u2019s histories. McCabe is a founder of a billion-dollar company, as is Musk. They have the funds to make their opinions heard in a myriad of ways; the hundreds of thousands, or even a million, they spent on this campaign have yielded dividends in terms of influence. Perhaps the best course of action for their project is to ignore it.<\/p>\n

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