Four friends who grew up graffitiing Evanston walls returned to their hometown this month to add more color and to celebrate the addition of a new “permission wall” for the next generation of writers.
Garrett Munski, Ole Flores, Alex Mendoza and Jordan Nickel grew up tagging walls, viaducts, underpasses and more as kids in Evanston in the 1990s and early 2000s. Nickel built his adult career around creating art, working under the artist name POSE, Munski went on to work as a mechanic while Flores is a CPA. Mendoza owns his own sign company.
The four reunited for the first time in decades earlier this month, when they gathered to legally tag a wall on Green Bay Road at Simpson Street. Johnny Cash and Buena Vista Social Club blasted while the four created their individual panels with color and spray cans.
The wall is the precursor to a permissible graffiti wall scheduled to open later this summer on the other side of the same wall, facing an overgrown empty lot.
The four men reminisced about their days as high school taggers while they completed the strokes and shading with their spray cans.
“As far as graffiti went, Evanston had a strong culture,” Munski says. The town attracted residents who “wanted to raise a family and have a touch of the city.”
As a result, “Evanston had a lot of soul back then,” says Munski, who still lives there.
For his contribution, Flores returned from Skokie, where he lives now, to Evanston, where he was born and raised. He remembered as a kid watching Nickel, who is a few years older, paint walls. This mural was the first time he has painted in 20 years.
“Time passes. The passion doesn’t,” he says, adding that it felt “like I never left.”
Flores’ mom once worked nearby as a glass etcher, he says. She died last year and her name, “Ava,” can be found in etching-style letters on his panel of the wall.
Mendoza says that while he paints and creates nearly every day for his work as a sign maker, this project hit differently: “One’s an art and one’s a trade.”
He says of this month’s work, “I get to share time with great people that I’ve known a long time.”
Nickel also called the project “a break from work.” He remembered how his bus route went down Green Bay Road, and the new project brought out old friends and family to stop by and check in.
“You realize the fabric of this community is intertwined,” he says.
The passing of time has brought about a different attitude toward graffiti as well. In 2026, people are honking and waving, he says. If the friends had tried the same project in 1993, “you’d just get arrested” and “someone would steal your paint,” he says with a laugh.
The new collaboration mural came together with help from 5th Ward Councilmember Bobby Burns and Lea Pinsky and Dustin Harris of Art Encounter. Pinsky and Harris organized the artists and pitched the city’s arts council on the project. Burns actively supported adding the project to a wall in his ward.
Minski says he hopes the upcoming permission wall gives kids a safe place to practice painting and gets them outside and moving their bodies. Having a wall to practice on is “important to figure out the craft,” he says.
In addition, says Minski, “police aren’t going to pull up and put you in handcuffs,” which when he was a teen, “happened all the time.”
