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Logan Square Blue Line Mural 'Destroyed' by Graffiti After One Week

By Darryl Holliday | September 22, 2014 6:04am
 "What? We can’t have nice things?” the work's commissioner said of the deliberate public art bomb.
Blue Line Mural Destroyed
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LOGAN SQUARE — The neighborhood’s newest mural was barely up one week before it was bombed with red and white graffiti outside the Logan Square Blue Line.

The new work from Roscoe Village-based artist Rachel Slotnick was targeted by taggers between 11 p.m. Friday and 1:30 p.m. Saturday, according to Lindsey Meyers, owner of Beauty and Brawn gallery, a Logan Square gallery that commissioned the work.

“They killed our mural last night. It’s a pretty big F-U,” she said Saturday as she and a few friends applied cans of graffiti remover to the mural, scrubbing at the acrylic paint and polyurethane seal.

As Meyers pointed out, the graffiti is largely illegible.

“Not cool, right?” She asked. “At least if it were good graffiti I could say, 'Why didn’t you just help us?'”

The pastel panorama on Sept. 13 officially replaced a a blue and yellow piece that was regarded by many as an iconic and nearly unavoidable image on Logan Square’s high-profile main drag.

Meyers said she expected the new mural would attract a typical number of small tags over time but was shocked to find that taggers had covered large sections with two indecipherable white-and-red letters and symbols over the weekend.

A large set of block writing was also left above the mural.

“We thought we’d get tagged mildly, but this is just [an attempt] to destroy. It’s total destruction, and it’s a slight to the community,” she said. “What? We can’t have nice things?” 

“Those were the silhouettes of the kids that worked on it with us,” she added, pointing to outline paintings of Beauty and Brawn students, who had helped paint and inlay jewels along the wall. “This isn’t a way to make a name. There’s a code of ethics; this is something you just don’t do.”

Much of the mural remained untouched, and friends and supporters of Beauty and Brawn worked until past dark Saturday to help restore the artwork.

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