When a mural was discussed at a meeting for Roseland’s new “cop house,” promoters suggested getting kids from the neighborhood to paint it.
“Why not my kids?” asked Dolores Ruiz-Villalvazo, community school coordinator at Chicago International Charter School Prairie, next to St. Anthony’s Catholic Church in the heart of the neighborhood. It’s the same place she went to school as a child growing up in Roseland.
And that’s how faces of Roseland’s teens ended up in a mural on the side of the new house that’s intended to provide increased safety and resources for the Far South Side community.
The cop house is an initiative from 9th Ward Ald. Anthony Beale to deter crime in the Calumet District. “Cop” stands for community-oriented policing. The house, which is at 12020 S. Indiana Ave., is modeled after a program in Racine, Wisconsin, that places resource houses in high-crime neighborhoods. At the cop house, which is expected to open this fall, residents can get to know local law enforcement and tap community services, like workforce development training and job readiness programs. It also can serve as a gathering spot for the community or a quiet spot to stop and stay for a bit.
Most of the teens depicted in the Roseland mural were eighth graders last year.
“I’m an artist that really believes [in] real people, real stories,” said David Guana, the Pilsen-based artist who designed the mural. He spoke with the students and with community residents to find out what they wanted. What he heard was “more representation of people like themselves in public art. They wanted to see businesses.”
They “wanted the tone of the piece to be something positive, something prideful,” he said.
So he worked with art teacher Nicolas Pesa to recruit students to help him paint the mural. Their faces are on the mural. So is the face of a beloved former school security guard who recently died. Their images appear over a map of Roseland, with shout-outs to local businesses like Old Fashioned Donuts and Shorty’s Mexican Grill. Pesa pulled it together with colorful rainbow arcs of pink, yellow and green.
The group painted the mural with acrylic and spray paints before applying a protective coating and mounting it on the wall of the brick, two-story home.
Now, it sits on the north wall of the house.
Chicago Neighborhood Initiative is the nonprofit that owns the house and is developing the project. It also provided the grant for the mural, said senior project manager Donald Higgins.
In the end, Higgins said, the project is about the community.
“We’re partnering with the police and neighboring organizations to have this as a space where we can provide programming” like workforce development training, job readiness programs and trauma services. “It’s pretty much a resource for the community.”