The artist known as Kozmo created her signature happy cheeseburger more than 10 years ago, when she was invited to participate in an art show about Mother Nature.
She combined her favorite early memories of her parents: picking dandelions in abandoned lots with her mother and eating her father’s home-cooked cheeseburgers.
Now, you can find cheery cheeseburgers bursting from the center of pink-petaled flowers all around Chicago. Kozmo’s mom’s favorite color was pink.
The flowers wear various expressions of glee, an emotion that was a work-in-progress for a while as Kozmo explored what kind of creature her burger creation should be.
Now, “that’s what you’re seeing, more of a joyous burger flower,” Kozmo says.
One of her newer burger-flower creations is on the side of Temax Garden Cafe at South Western Avenue and West 26th Street, where it turns into South Blue Island Avenue on the eastern edge of Little Village near the Lower West Side.
The burger flower seems to have its eyes closed with delight, as a pencil down the wall draws a squiggly rainbow line stretching away from the flower. Pink sparkles seem to twinkle above and below the rainbow, and Kozmo’s name is signed in a pink heart above the burger flower.
The mural came about as Kozmo added a burger flower to the viaduct intersection at West 26th Street, South Blue Island Avenue and South Western Avenue, just south of the restaurant. She looked up and saw the blank wall and thought it would be the perfect spot for a mural, with high visibility from the intersection. So she went in and asked the owners if she could paint it.
“Yes please — and we serve burgers” was the reply.
Temax Garden Cafe is a family-run, Mexican restaurant that also serves American classics like hamburgers and sandwiches. Kozmo says she was happy to bring them more attention. She added the pencil, she says, because kids regularly pass by the intersection or wait at the bus stop on their way to school or the Rauner Family YMCA.
With this mural, Kozmo wanted to add “something happy, something bright, something creative,” she says. The pencil reminds students what they are capable of.
Kozmo started painting outdoor murals after her second child was born, she says, as a way to deal with postpartum depression. It helped her following the births of her three youngest children. She has four kids.
“My husband said, ‘We need to get you back into art,’” she says. “It was so crazy and chaotic, but it helped me so much. That’s what art does.”
Kozmo’s paintings are all over the city, but mostly on the South Side where she grew up and still lives.
“There are so many locations that could use a little paint, use a little love,” she says.