The toughest mural artist Melanie Posner ever painted was on West Chestnut Street in downtown Chicago, she says.
She couldn’t squeeze a lift into the tight space next to the building. So, the team that commissioned the project built tiered scaffolding that she climbed every day, scrambling up and down a 60-foot ladder to paint one strip of the mural at a time.
She saw the entire mural for the first time after it was finished and the scaffolding pulled away, she says.
“It was honestly the craziest mural I’ve done in my life,” Posner says. “It was a labor of love for sure.”
Posner flew to Chicago from her home in Los Angeles in July to paint the mural on a 150-year old residential building at 10 W. Chestnut St., across from Loyola University’s Water Tower campus. Now, the 30-foot mural stretches the top two floors of the four-story apartment building in the Near North Side.
In this mural, a woman is wearing a loose green tank top with matching, swirly green earrings and bright green sunglasses. The sun seems to shine behind her like a halo with the words “one destination, endless possibilities” arcing over her head. A pink, blue and purple sky glows behind her, with the shadows of palm trees visible over one shoulder. A pair of dice and a row of three 7s, like on a slot machine, reflect in the lenses of her sunglasses.
Along with the scaffolding, this mural posed other unique challenges, Posner says. She typically paints with brushes, but this mural called for spray paints. She navigated a number of rain delays over the three and a half days that it took her to finish the mural.
The mural, with its Southern California roots and style, was commissioned as part of a campaign to celebrate the opening of Hollywood Casino Joliet in August. But there is little branding on the mural, apart from the gambling icons and a small QR code in the top corner. The woman’s earrings match the casino’s color scheme, but that’s about it.
“I primarily paint women and my work is very vibrant. The colors just make me really happy and they play really well with the messaging that I’m trying to portray.”
The mural also has a sense of permanence that not all street art holds, Posner says.
“With the brick that it’s on, we were told that it should be there indefinitely. It would be really really hard to remove because of how old the building is,” Posner says. “I look at her in a different light because of that. With public art, not everything is temporary.”