Chicago murals: Civil Rights sit-in photo is subject of Darius Dennis’ Red Line art

One of the most visible murals from the CTA’s Red Line is an Uptown painting by Darius Dennis of a 1966 photo by Danny Lyon, a Civil Rights Movement photographer with strong Chicago ties.

Dennis, who grew up in Uptown, covered the upper portion of a massive wall on the side of the Cornerstone Community Outreach homeless shelter at 4628 N. Clifton Ave.

The mural is based on a photograph by Danny Lyon, a University of Chicago graduate who built his career in Chicago in the 1960s.

The sepia-toned painting is a detailed rendering of Lyon’s 1963 photograph of a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee staff sit-in at a Toddle House restaurant in Atlanta. Lyons was a photographer for the organization, which coordinated protests during the Civil Rights Movement.

There was “a lot of serendipity in making that image great and fantastic even though it represented a moment of struggle and hardship,” Dennis says. “The sit-in itself is about demanding a seat at the table.

“It is about desegregation, the end of Jim Crow, the combination of those things and then trying to represent it through an elegant snapshot in history. Danny did it. There’s no argument that he did.”

Dennis and his team completed the Uptown mural in May 2023. It’s the fourth of his “I Am” series of large, detailed interpretations of Civil Rights-era photos, three of them shot by Lyon, a friend of Dennis.

The first, titled “I Am a Man,” is in Wicker Park and is based on a photograph by Bob Adelman. Painted in 2020, it’s visible from the Blue Line.

The other two — which are in Louisville, Kentucky, and Rochester, New York — also feature interpretations of Lyon’s photos.

The proximity to the L tracks was important for the two Chicago paintings, according to Dennis, who grew up riding the L and knows rooftop graffiti culture and how to place artwork to be visible.

Dennis says he remembers going to Wicker Park as a kid, before the neighborhood was gentrified. Some of his childhood friends lived in the building that serves as a canvas for that painting.

“Knowing what Wicker Park was when I was a child versus what Wicker Park is today, there’s a huge change,” he says. “It’s not the same neighborhood it used to be, for good and for bad. That wall happened to be a great place to try to make a powerful message about African American history.”

Dennis says the mural in Uptown — which L riders can see between the Wilson and Argyle stations — was meaningful to him because it involved painting something significant in the neighborhood where he grew up. Dennis says he remembers riding the Red Line as a teenager and the murals that covered that wall in the 1990s.

The image shows a woman in the center gazing out from a diner counter, while the men around her are involved in conversations and looking in different directions. Dennis calls the woman “Uptown’s Mona Lisa.”

Larger-than-life murals are nothing new to Dennis. He owns Big Wall Signs, where he paints large-scale, lifelike images for corporate clients and others. He’s painted Chicago murals for NASCAR and Premier League soccer. In Los Angeles, he painted a 12-foot tall portrait of Snoop Dogg before the 2022 Super Bowl.

But it’s the “I Am” series that Dennis says he gets asked about the most.

He says the image portrayed in the Uptown mural is about “trying to find the beauty in the resilience, trying to give people their flowers for their hard work. All those things are embodied in that piece.”