Kari Blak knew when he designed a mural for the Bessie Coleman Branch Library in Woodlawn that he might walk by it every day. He better submit a design he liked for the library four blocks from his house.
What he didn’t expect was for library and city staff to like his three design proposals so much that they’d ask him to combine them into one long mural.
Now, visitors and passersby can enjoy Blak’s many nods to history, education and Woodlawn along the west-facing wall of the library at 731 E. 63rd St. As he conceived the mural, which is next to the Green Line’s Cottage Grove L station, Blak says, he thought about “all the kids who go up to the library every day.”
For those children, and as a neighbor, Blak says, he wanted the mural to give a nod “to our history, and at the same time look forward to our future.”
He also sought to “give them some Easter eggs for them to explore and find and learn new things about our culture that they might not have known.”
Those hidden gems include Miel, one of Blak’s regular characters who dresses like a bee, and a portrait of aviator Bessie Coleman, the library’s namesake, wearing her flight gear. He also included an airplane, again paying tribute to Coleman, who was the first Black woman to fly an airplane. One of Coleman’s earliest flying exhibitions was in 1922 at Checkerboard Airdrome, which is now Chicago Midway International Airport.
Miel is one of Blak’s regular characters that he uses in creations with the company he founded, Petalhead. The other regular in Blak’s work is a flower character named Taru.
“These characters specifically are used as a tool to talk about climate change and environmentalism,” he says. “I couldn’t find anything that resonated or affected people more than climate change and environmentalism.”
He says the mural’s depiction of a space shuttle blasting off represents “our imagination being able to take off the page and explore,” while a kid growing a tree out of a book could symbolize “knowledge teaching us how to plant, grow and expand our imaginations.”
The butterfly is a symbol of immigration and the importance of their presence in Chicago, while the native Cardinal and other birds represent flight and taking off, he says. Meanwhile “the scuba diver can be a metaphor for our minds and taking a deep dive into books and the stories we like to indulge in.”
Blak hand drew the three original proposals, then used Photoshop to merge them, he says. He had the final design printed in gray line on 33 individual squares of nonwoven material “that jigsaw together and make the big image,” he says.
Blak and his assistants then spent three to four weeks hand painting the squares, and setting them up all over his three-bedroom apartment to dry, he says. Then they assembled them on the wall of the library in one day last summer.
Creating murals is Blak’s main job, he says, and recent clients include Stroger Hospital, Providence Hospital and Chance the Rapper’s team. He also held his first solo art show this year and has started making collectible toys and installation sculptures.
“It was a really busy year,” Blak says. “I’m so ready for the holidays.”