South Side Murals: The Crumbling Spirit of Hyde Park
By Laura M. Browning in Arts & Entertainment on Apr 27, 2010 6:00PM
Deep in Hyde Park, on the walls of a Metra underpass, there is a mural so decrepit and crumbling that you would be forgiven for missing it while walking by. The Spirit of Hyde Park was designed and executed by Astrid Fuller in 1973 and has suffered from lack of restoration over the past three decades. Layers of graffiti and whitewash have exaggerated the ghostliness of the mural's figures, and spalling concrete and leakage have rendered parts of the mural nearly invisible beneath the damage. The mural is massive, about 2,100 square feet, and spans the entire underpass at 57th Street and Lake Park.
As with many murals in Chicago, this was a neighborhood effort, and 15 neighborhood children volunteered to help Fuller. She was so taken with their eagerness and dedication that she divided them up into a morning and afternoon crew so that she could give each child sufficient attention, and the kids applied all of the flat colors themselves. Chicago muralist Bill Walker (whom we've talked about before) acted as Fuller's mentor in this enormous endeavor, and three years later, painted a powerful and controversial mural opposite Spirit of Hyde Park. Walker's Justice for Delbert Tibbs spoke to the perceived injustice of a black Chicagoan convicted of murder in Florida, and, sadly, the mural was later destroyed during Metra station renovation.
Though Fuller's original design for Spirit had been approved by nearby residents and businesses, it was also not without controversy, with at least one local newspaper lambasting it as "violent." In response, NBC-Chicago reporter Len O'Connor described the mural as a "wall of hope that has tried to record the heartbeat of mankind in community."
We think it's a bit difficult to interpret Fuller's mural as violent, as it openly calls for mutual respect, civil rights, and equality - values as meaningful today as they were more than 30 years ago. We know that outdoor art is often transient, especially with weather as extreme as Chicago's, but we think that this art is as worthwhile as any on a museum wall, and we hope that restoration funding becomes available for this mural before it's too late.
Fuller was responsible for a number of similarly themed murals in Hyde Park, which you can read more about at the Chicago Public Art Group's website. Take your cameras and be sure to tag your photos with "chicagoist."