They are acclaimed artist Chris Ware; and the city’s cultural historian, Tim Samuelson.
Tim Samuelson, cultural historian emeritus: This was an interest that we both shared, but Chris was able to put it into form as an exhibit. I could have never put together something like this.
Even where there’s comics pages I know well and have read since a kid, when I see them on the wall like this it’s like, “Oh, wow.”
Chris Ware, artist: A comic strip really is a visual two-dimensional rat maze, so I tried to create a three-dimensional analog to that and to use every available spot that I could because in comics you’re likely to see a dialogue balloon here and there and an image behind, so I wanted to use the entire walls and not just have everything be a dried bathtub ring of imagery that gets dreary.
Marc Vitali: These are not the images of Chicago you’d see in a visitor’s guide.
Still, the odd corners the paintings depict are as much a part of the city as Navy Pier or the Museum campus.
Artist Andy Paczos pedals a bike that hauls his canvas and supplies.
He heads to the same location he’s worked at for months – a corner of the Van Buren Street bridge near Wacker Drive.
He sets up his easel. And gets to work on a highly detailed painting.
A painting of a fork in the Chicago river by Andy Paczos. (Photo by Dimitre Photography, Chicago)
Marc Vitali:Juan Pastor switches from his drum kit to the cajon without missing a beat.
Juan Pastor: This is the cajon. It’s an Afro-Peruvian instrument that I grew up playing. Most Peruvian people know what a cajon is because a lot of them are just in houses. It’s kind of a popular thing, even for people that are not musicians, to have a cajon in their home.
It’s a simple instrument. It’s a box, there’s a hole in here and it is played with your hands. It has basically two sounds, the low and the high, and it’s used for most of the Afro-Peruvian dances.
Multimedia Company in Chicago Connects Audiences, Artists During Pandemic wttw.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from wttw.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
By the age of 23 he had fought in World War II, tangled with Gen. Patton, and won his first Pulitzer Prize. Cartoonist Bill Mauldin created artwork for magazines, books and newspapers from the 1940s into the ‘90s. We explore a new exhibition of his work.