Kyle Brand is an artist and Michigan transplant whose first two murals in his new city can be found in his adopted neighborhood of Uptown.
His style is inspired by the comic books he has written and illustrated since he was a kid, with fine lines and bright colors. His subjects are often people doing ordinary things.
“I really enjoy drawing people in regular settings and people living their normal, everyday lives,” says Brand, who moved to Chicago in 2022. Alongside those images, he likes to portray “how nature encroaches” and cohabitates with people.
That style played well into his first mural, which is at Graceland Walls Gallery, a collection of about 60 4-by-4-foot panels on the outside wall of Graceland Cemetery along the CTA Red Line tracks. He painted that one over about seven hours one summer day of 2024. Additions to Graceland Walls Gallery are installed as part of Uptown Art Week, with artists often matched with a local business. Brand was paired with the Wilson Club Apartments. That’s the market-rate complex that replaced the Wilson Men’s Hotel, previously one of the most affordable SROs in Chicago.
Brand dedicated his mural to the building’s history and titled it “Old Growth.” He painted an older man in a beanie and two shirts, looking into the distance, with flower branches appearing to grow out and through him. Those flowers were inspired by the wallpaper in the renovated building’s lobby, he says. The mural is done in black and white, with hues of blue and green.
“I enjoy both portraiture and painting floral,” Brand says, so the mural’s subject was an natural fit for him.
Justin Weidl, director of neighborhood services for Uptown United and Uptown Chamber of Commerce, says, “We loved his mural so much, we invited him to paint another one in the alley.”
That’s how Brand’s second mural, “Regrowth,” also came to be last summer. It’s in the Clifton Avenue Street Art Gallery across Wilson Street from the CTA station.
That mural features a girl with dark hair pulled back into a pony tail, eyes closed, head tilted down, surrounded by leaves, branches and colorful flowers growing up around her. The images pop from a black background with a red border surrounding it all.
“We love the addition of ‘Regrowth.’ That space used to be a billboard. Huge upgrade,” Weidl says. “It brings color and youth to the alley. And we’re always trying to add new pieces to bring people back.”
For Brand, one opportunity in his new city leads to another. “Regrowth” led to a private commission of two indoor murals in Chinatown, which Brand recently finished, he says.
Brand says he’s looking to paint more outdoor murals and is working on a comic book with one of his buddies. He also holds a 9-to-5 job as a designer.
A native of Metro Detroit, “throughout college I would come visit Chicago all the time and think, ‘I really want to move here,’” Brand says. He found a job that allows him to work from home, and a friend here who was looking in for a roommate. “So we found a place. It felt like destiny.”