Chicago murals: New Rogers Park painting features beloved farmers market

Rogers Park’s newest mural captures one of the joys of living in Chicago’s northernmost neighborhood: the Glenwood Sunday Market.

The vibrant mural — three stories tall and six parking spaces wide — is on on West Morse Avenue. In the painting, a woman carrying flowers holds hands with her son and gazes down at him as they walk along Glenwood Avenue, the colorful cobblestone street tucked along the Red Line L tracks where the market is held Sundays from June through September.

The neighborhood’s tall old trees billow behind the vendors selling their produce and the shoppers carrying bags brimming with vegetables. The phrase "#LoveRogersPark" stretches off to the left side of the painting.

The people depicted in the mural are actual shoppers at the market, including the artist, Ryan Tova Katz, and her son. Katz finished the work, the latest mural in a neighborhood of murals, earlier this month.

The work was originally commissioned about 18 months ago by a private resident who envisioned it as a tribute to the market and his beloved Rogers Park community, Katz says.

Katz, her husband and two young children “went to the farmers market every weekend for four weekends and took pictures,” she says. “I would try to meet as many people as I could and say, ‘This is what I’m doing. Do you want to be in the mural?’ And most people said, ‘That’s amazing. Of course.’ ”

Ultimately, the Rogers Park Business Alliance, a nonprofit serving local businesses and residents in the neighborhood, took over responsibility for the mural. This group runs the farmers market and is responsible for the Mile of Murals project that commissions murals along the Glenwood Avenue tracks between Estes Avenue and Pratt Boulevard. As those walls filled up, the group began putting murals in the surrounding neighborhoods, too.

So, they knew the perfect spot for Katz's mural: a tall wall with brown peeling paint in the heart of Morse Avenue just east of North Greenview Avenue.

“It’s right around the corner from our farmers market,” says Sandi Price, executive director of Rogers Park Business Alliance. “It’s a lot of people, it’s a lot of interaction, it’s a lot of community. ... Rogers Park is one of those places, it’s a small town in a big city.”

The photo of Katz and her son, Milo, was taken at the market by Katz's daughter. The person who first commissioned the piece asked Katz to include it.

The mural took about two weeks to complete, with Katz and her team working multiple 12-hour days. She’s never heard as much support while painting a mural as she did from Rogers Park neighbors, she says.

“Ten to 30 people would come up to us every day and say, ‘Thank you. This wall needed this, we love it. It’s beautiful.’ "