Anna, a 45-year-old grandmother from Roseland, sat on the steps beneath the entrance dock of a boarded-up building on Elston just south of Armitage. It was an unseasonably warm afternoon in early April, and Anna was having a smoke outside the artwork she was living in. Next to her was a ramshackle collection of panels made of plywood and shipping pallets, onto which painted wood objects, scraps of lumber, store signage, and other street detritus had been screwed together to form three-dimensional collages. One panel was attached to a wall; others laid in a pile, under which she had room to sleep and keep her few possessions. Other art-festooned pieces were propped against the wall around the corner. She said another woman, Isabel, had been using those, but wasn’t around–her shopping cart was gone.
The works are the remnants of pieces created by four local artists–Juan Chavez, Mike Genovese, Cody Hudson, and Chris Silva. Together and individually, for the past few years they’ve searched alleys and junk-strewn lots for cast-off materials, which they make into collages that they later surreptitiously slap onto vacant storefronts, construction fences, and other unused spaces, most often in West Town and Pilsen. Few of the dozens of street installations they’ve created survived more than a few weeks before they were torn down or scavenged, which is part of their point: the pieces are meant to reflect the cycles of urban reclamation and decay. Some pieces are more durable, however; parts of an artwork they installed at the building on Elston in December were still there last week.
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During a few days in late March and early April, the artists piled the pieces into trucks and installed them around town. Some of the wall collages were attached to a wooden fence along Milwaukee just north of Moffat; others were installed in the back of a vacant lot on North Avenue and Bosworth. They reconstructed the hut on a railroad viaduct near Wood and Carroll, and put the “shipwreck” on a railroad embankment near Cermak and Canal–not far from an actual boatyard. Armed with power screwdrivers, the four worked in the daytime to avoid arousing suspicion. They drew scant notice.
Anna wasn’t at the building on Elston when I stopped by again in mid-April. Earlier in the month she told me she was going to try to straighten out her life: she was planning to move in with her parents in Roseland and enter a drug treatment program. She hoped to reunite with her family and land another job as a caregiver for the elderly.
