Drive south on Ashland Avenue in the West Loop and where the road dips and pops up again for the train tracks, two new mosaics of red, blue and orange roses burst from a building on the east side of the street.
The rose is a symbol for the Little Brothers – Friends of the Elderly Chicago, an organization that for decades has used volunteers to help relieve isolation and loneliness among older adults in their communities. The building is the organization’s longtime home.
The new mosaics are the result of a two-year collaboration between Chicago seniors and teens who work with the organization and Green Star Movement, a nonprofit that taps Chicago Public Schools students to create murals around the city. Over two years, volunteers with the two groups created the massive art project that now hangs on the building walls.
“It was the beginning of a match made in heaven,” says Simone Mitchell-Peterson, CEO of Little Brothers – Friends of the Elderly. “We like working together and exposing young people to older adults and dispelling a lot of those stereotypes. There are a lot of people who do not have older adults, grandparents and role models in their lives.”
Older people dispelled some of their own biases too, Mitchell-Peterson says. “We buy into the stereotypes of young people and how they are. But when you sit shoulder to shoulder working on a shared passion, things change.”
The groups tapped their skills to share and learn from each other. Dozens of seniors and teens from all over the city met regularly over two years to cut mosaic pieces and assemble them onto 55 boards to be hung on the building’s exterior walls, organizers said. Every time they gathered, they also shared a hot meal.
“It’s been such a labor of love,” agrees Kamelia Hristeva, founder and CEO of Green Star Movement. It was “cool to watch the two age groups connect and collaborate over this shared art project.”
The nearly three-story-tall murals appear as multicolored roses with dark green stems and two-toned green leaves on a background of bluish silver. One of the two murals, on the north side of the building, starts at the east edge and stretches over, moving in and around four windows. The other starts on the west side of the building and stretches north, two abstract round shapes that almost seem to reach for each other.
The project was such a success, Hristeva says, that she and Mitchell-Peterson are scouting locations for their next project to continue the connection between old and young.
“Technology is isolating people more and more. This work is so important,” Hristeva says. Next, “we want to beautify some of the neighborhoods where the seniors and teens live.”