Lea Pinsky and Dustin Harris view their hometown as a giant, open-air gallery.
“We’re curating an art show all over Evanston,” says Pinsky, executive director of Art Encounter, which operates from an office in Evanston’s Noyes Cultural Arts Center.
Indeed, when someone in Evanston wants a new mural — on the side of a school, along a viaduct or under pedestrians’ feet — Pinsky and Harris usually get the call. It’s one thing to have a vision. But execution? That’s a little harder.
So for those ambitious non-profits, civic groups, schools and business districts, Pinsky and Harris comb their contacts of artists to figure out who would be a good fit for the spot. Does the person seeking the mural have the necessary approvals? Do permits need to be pulled? When can the artist schedule it? How much will it cost?
Pinsky and Harris spend about a year answering these questions and more for each mural they bring to Evanston. Once the logistics are ironed out, the muralist can paint. Over more than a decade, those efforts added up. Pinsky and Harris have coordinated more than 30 murals in Evanston and made Chicago’s neighboring northern suburb a destination for street art. For them, bringing exceptional muralists to town is a priority.
“Our murals are gorgeous and impactful,” says Harris. “And provocative,” Pinsky adds.
Pinsky and Harris, Evanston natives, returned to their roots in 2012, after spending years in Rogers Park. There, the two began the “Mile of Murals” along the CTA railroad tracks embankment, recruiting artists who they still commission for work and painting murals of their own.
Some of the artists who contribute murals to Evanston’s streets, alleys and underpasses travel from as far as Los Angeles, New York, and Detroit. But most are from Evanston or Chicago. They include some of Chicago’s best-known names in street art, like Max Sansing, Rahmaan Statik, Mario Mena, Damon Lamar Reed, Sholo Beverly and Cheri Lee Charlton.
Their work graces some of the highest-profile spots in Evanston. It was Pinsky and Harris who got the call to coordinate a mural as the gateway to Evanston’s new Lorraine H. Morton City Hall and adjacent Metra station. For that job they tapped Sansing, whose work can be found around Evanston, Chicago and the world.
Sansing expanded upon a mural he began in 2022, which turned the ramp up to the Metra train station platform into “cake layers” of a multicolored, abstract, spray-painted mural. He continued by adding a profile of Morton, the city’s former longtime mayor for whom the building is named.
Pinsky and Harris coordinated a ground mural by Miguel A. Del Real on the busy pedestrian plaza at Orrington Avenue and Davis Street. They’ve orchestrated murals by Mena on Chute Middle School, Jess Patterson and Reed at Dawes Elementary School, Statik at Oakton Elementary School and Molly Zakrajsek at Evanston Township High School, among many more.
These murals “make an impact on people’s lives,” Harris says. “Public art has a place that can comfort people.”
