DRAWING LINES

Hello, and welcome to my Civic Term course called “Drawing Lines”. In this 3-week course, we have had a lot of hands-on field experiences. Sadly but surely, it has come to an end as all good things do. This is the final and only project for my class, "Drawing Lines". In this course, we focused on defining what public art is. My definition of public art changed after taking this class. At the beginning of this course, I believed that "Public art is any art that resided outside or in the public’s view.” Throughout this course, I saw public art through touring different areas of Chicago such as the Downtown Loop, Pilsen, and Wicker Park. We met with people and organizations such as Nathan Mason from Chicago’s Cultural Center, Katanya from Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, and the Chicago Public Art Group. From these experiences during this class, I have come to finalization on my definition of “public art”. Public art is art that resides in the public’s accessibility and is a representation of expression either of one’s self or a group of people." We studied public art first-hand by becoming tour guides in the neighborhoods of Lincoln Park, Downtown Loop, Pilsen, and Wicker Park. We mapped out routes through these different areas in order to have a time-efficient route. Some of my favorite artworks were by Eduardo Kobra, Hebru Brantley, and Sam Kirk. Something that stuck with me from these tours was the reasoning of how street art is interpreted by non-graffiti writers compared to graffiti writers. The difference between graffiti art and gang tagging/graffiti is important because it differentiates something positive to an artistic group from a negatively impacting group of people. We watched, broke down, and discussed the movie, Style Wars. It's a movie about how graffiti writing and tagging came into existence through hip hop and break dancing influences. The biggest takeaway from this course is the work we did with Rich Alapack of "We All Live Here". He has a mural saying his infamous phrase all throughout Chicago's 77 neighborhoods. Recently, we helped begin the process of putting up a mural at Moody's Pub in Edgewater. Our class put together a coffee table book from thorough research behind artworks by many different artists. Each artwork wasn't just a mural, some were sculptures and even moving digital graphics.

Hiu To. "Beginning We All Live Here Mural".2019

For this action project, we were instructed to make a public art proposal for the Grossinger Toyota and Kia of Lincoln Park. The area surrounding our current school campus doesn't stand out with public art or any exciting colors. Our group decided to focus on the people who make the neighborhood thrive in diversity and wealth; the employees of several businesses throughout Lincoln Park and Near North. Our mural would have to speak to a specific group of people and have a meaning behind it. We also decided what we wanted the public to interpret from the mural.
The part of this action project that I am most proud of is our group's sketch proposal because of the effort and different ideas that went into the finished product.

Here below is our group's mural proposal for Grossinger Toyota/Kia of Lincoln Park.

Hiu To. "Grossinger Mural Proposal".2019

Hiu To. "Grossinger Mural Proposal".2019

Hiu To. "Grossinger Mural Proposal".2019

Artist Statement

We sophomore global citizens at GCE Lab School created this public mural proposal for Grossinger of Lincoln Park, to recognize the working citizens of this community. Public art is anything created with the intention to portray a message and be easily accessible to everybody of the art’s surrounding area. The meaning behind this public art mural proposal is the societal recognition of non-resident working people of Lincoln Park. We think that it is important to represent working-class people and people of color. It will inform and educate the residents and community members of Lincoln Park on why recognition of the working people at the establishments in the matters and why these workers should be respected. The inspiration for this piece is based on the people we interviewed, who work in this area but don’t live here. They sacrifice their time because they take public transit in order to get to their jobs. These working people build the community of this neighborhood because the residents of Lincoln Park are dependent on the services that they provide. If these people weren’t here, the community would not have its fancy food and dining, entertainment, education, shopping establishments, businesses, and institutions. This art piece is supposed to give credit to the working-class citizens of this community and how they are lifting up the neighborhood, Lincoln Park.

Thank you for reading through this action project. In conclusion to this 3-week civic term course, I got the opportunity to work with a professional artist and muralist, meet important people from organizations such as DCASE, CMAP, CPAG, and the Chicago Cultural Center. The most impactful experience for me was being able to seek out art more through my academics.