Chicago murals: Artist’s paintings memorializing the dead help him cope with loss

Milton Coronado didn’t understand his life’s purpose when he began painting his first remembrance mural. It featured his father, who was shot and killed in 2001 in Little Village, he says.

But by the time he had finished, he says, “I recognized the power art has for families who lose a loved one, especially for those who lose a loved one this way.”

The building that contained that mural was later torn down, Coronado says. But his motivation to honor the dead through art has grown.

His newest mural, featuring five fallen Chicago police officers, is part of what Coronado considers to be his life’s work. He was not commissioned to paint the one-story mural at 6451 S. Archer Avenue, he says, but did receive permission from the building’s owner to do so.

“In the past 2.5 years we’ve lost at least five officers, and I think that’s too many,” Coronado says. “I’ve never painted anything for Chicago police. I think the city deserved it, and I think the families deserved it.”

Coronado doesn’t only paint murals honoring the dead. A 2022 collaboration mural featured childhood video game characters from Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, for example. But his tribute murals are the ones for which he is best known.

The officers mural features Andres Vasquez Lasso, who was shot responding to a Gage Park domestic incident in 2023; Luis Huesca, who was shot in an apparent Gage Park carjacking in 2024; Aréanah Preston, who was shot during a teenage crime spree in Avalon Park in 2023; Ella French, who was shot during a traffic stop in West Englewood in 2021; and Enrique Martinez, who was shot in 2024 during a police stop in Chatham.

Coronado reached out to each family to learn more about the officers’ lives, their interests and the images that might best communicate who they were, he says. Community members learned of the project and donated their time and supplies.

Coronado tried to weave details about each officer’s life outside of work into the intricacies of the blue badge that each portrait wears, he says.

“Even though they’re still officers in Chicago, and that binds them together, they were individuals,” he says.

Another Coronado mural got attention in 2019 when he painted a piece that honored Marlen Ochoa-Lopez, the 19-year-old expectant mother who was strangled earlier that year, her baby cut from her womb. That mural is at 16th Street and Newberry Avenue in Pilsen.

Coronado also created a mural honoring Adam Toledo, a 13-year-old boy shot in Little Village by a Chicago police officer in 2021.

Coronado has other murals on 16th Street honoring people who have died. One is a tribute to his mother, another memorializes a friend who committed suicide, and a third remembers Vanessa Guillen, a U.S. soldier who was bludgeoned to death in Texas by another soldier from Calumet City.

Creating the tribute murals is a blessing, Coronado says. “When I paint them, I’m also healing from the loss of my father. It’s my calling, it’s my purpose, and I stand firm in it. I believe in my heart that we’re all called to serve.”