Reason I Love Chicago #1: Graffiti

Graffiti and urban art have always fascinated me. Police and property owners see graffiti as a terrible inconvenience, but I love looking at the lines and curves trespassing artists leave behind. It may be illegal, but it certainly is an art form.

Check out this awesome graffiti mural I stumbled across today painted just south of campus near the Granville Red Line stop–

This is just part of it; the mural stretches across an entire building. I did some Googling and found that this mural isn’t the only one of its kind– it’s part of a project called “Before I Die” started by a woman in her own neighborhood in New Orleans in February 2011. Since then, the murals have been painted around the world: Amsterdam, London, Portsmouth, Queretaro, Almaty, San Diego, Lisbon, Brooklyn and Melbourne… and now it has come to Chicago.

This article tells a little more about the project– Before I Die by Candy Chang, via Good News Only, a non-profit art gallery in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood.

“It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day and forget what really matters to you,” Good News Only writes. “This wall is a temporary installation where we can learn the hopes and dreams of the people around us.”

(Photo by me!)