On a recent weekday morning, there’s a buzz of activity along Englewood’s 63rd Street between May Street and Racine Avenue. Today, this corner is brimming with oversized drum sculptures, colorful murals that stretch the length of the property and a series of star-shaped artworks.
It’s all part of a new sculpture park, courtesy of the artist-driven Englewood Arts Collective. The group soft-launched the public art installation in August and will host activities here this weekend in alignment with the annual Englewood Music Festival. Over the next three to five years, the collective plans to fill this once-vacant lot with art and give neighbors a place of beauty to gather in.
As the train whirs by, cicadas hum and a team of lawnmowers meticulously cut the grass, Janell Nelson, the collective’s director and cofounder, walks through the space, wearing an orange T-shirt that says “joy builder” on the back. That’s Nelson’s M.O.
As she talks about the park’s transformation, Nelson says this is just the beginning of the collective’s work here.
“We’re still figuring out how to have even more community investment into the fabric of how this is sustained and grows,” said the 46-year-old Nelson, who was recently among the Field Foundation’s 2026 recipients of the Leaders for a New Chicago award. “Then next year we’re very much interested in how this can be an economic driver, both in the immediate sense to local artists, but then in a longer-form sense. It’s exciting to see what happens.”
The lot across from 16th Ward Ald. Stephanie Coleman’s office is privately owned, but had sat empty for several years. Through an agreement with the private owner, the collective got the green light to activate the space, rent-free, for three to five years with art and events.
This weekend, that will include filling the sculpture park with music and serving mocktails to visitors, who can take a trolley from the nearby Englewood Music Festival, now in its sixth year.
Nelson and her fellow Englewood-rooted artists who are part of the collective will also once again host a stage and arts village inside the music festival.
The sculpture park is the latest initiative since the collective — made up of 10 artists, including MacArthur Genius Grant winner Tonika Lewis Johnson — launched nearly a decade ago. It’s all rooted in rewriting the narrative of the South Side neighborhood, where members of the collective grew up.
“We were faced with what was going on in the media and what they chose to highlight,” said collective member David Robinson, aka Rob Smooth, a 53-year-old producer and artist. “So we sought out to change that narrative by making sure when you Google Englewood, a lot of good things would come up related to art, culture, film, music.”
Collective members say art has always had a home in Englewood. That includes esteemed saxophonist Ernest Dawkins’ longstanding Englewood Jazz Festival, which will take place Sept. 17-19.
In recent years, the collective also hosted a studio and exhibition pop-up in collaboration with the chamber of commerce, provided direct financial support to artists and organized skill-building workshops. This latest effort is about bringing beauty and foot traffic to the 63rd Street corridor.
Like other South and West side neighborhoods, Englewood has faced ongoing disinvestment. The sculpture park sits just blocks from the former Whole Foods, a once-heralded economic improvement catalyst that ultimately closed in 2022 after only six years in the neighborhood.
“Artistic acts like this and creative spaces like this can catalytically support other well-being initiatives,” Nelson said. “Positive foot traffic to this corridor can help the economic outcomes of the other businesses in this corridor, and it’s been proven.”
Earlier this summer, a celebration recognized artist Milton Mizenburg Jr. and his sculptures on view in a garden in Oakland, a pocket community just north of Kenwood and east of Bronzeville. Both that display and the one in Englewood are a testament to art’s ability to transform public spaces.
As visitors enter the Englewood park along May Street, they pass by a mirrored gate, which Nelson said is a hat tip to Chicago’s famous “Bean” in Millennium Park, but also, “a reflection of our love for the community. It’s a reflection of the people that live here.”
A gravel path leads past the painted star sculptures, which the Magnificent Mile Association commissioned the collective to create for an installation along Michigan Avenue last year. Now, the colorful works by six Chicago artists have a new home.
Deeper inside the park sit five oversized painted drums, part of the national touring show known as The Stories of Us. Each of the works reflect on America and its past as the nation turns 250 years old. One of the drums, painted by collective member Pugs Atomz, wrestles with the history of the U.S. Census, especially in Black neighborhoods like Englewood. Pieces from Stories of Us are also currently displayed at Chicago’s Navy Pier and in Douglass Park.
The sculpture park also features an 80-foot-long mural painted on a line of shipping containers, and further in the distance, there’s a mural of a young girl picking dandelions. It’s a work by Chicago muralist Ryan Tova Katz, based on a photo taken by Tonika Lewis Johnson.
Hector Gonzalez helped lead the space’s transformation as the project and site manager. When work began, the 53-year-old Gonzalez said the land was full of leftover construction materials — like broken cinder blocks and concrete — from when a former building was demolished. But Gonzalez, an artist himself, saw the vision for what the space could become.
“Now that it’s done, and the grass is cut and everything. I look at it. I’m like, ‘yes, this is exactly how I wanted it in my head,’” said Gonzalez, who added that he sees similarities between the disinvestment in Englewood and in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood, where he grew up.
Now, as an adult, he sees projects like this as an investment in the neighborhood’s youth.
“That’s in the back of my head, always, is providing something that kids can look up to and be like, ‘oh wow. That’s for me, in my neighborhood, and I don’t have to go out to Downtown or Lincoln Park,’” Gonzalez said. “And they feel happy and excited about it, and they’re proud to be where they come from.”
The transformation of the space was funded primarily through grants from groups like the Chicago Community Trust and Driehaus Foundation.
At the center of the garden, there’s a spot that Nelson said has been left intentionally blank — it’s her way of leaving room for whatever comes next. But in the meantime, Nelson says with pride, “Our soft launch went hard.”
Courtney Kueppers is an arts and culture reporter at WBEZ.