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What Are These Weird Boxes In Lincoln Square And Who's Making Them?

LINCOLN SQUARE — We have a mystery on our hands, Square-villians.

Strange shadow boxes have cropped up near a pair of CTA Brown Line stations and we have questions.

Box on Rockwell, near the Brown Line station. [DNAinfo/Patty Wetli]

Are there more?

What do they mean?

Who's responsible?

Clever or creepy?

We spotted the box at Rockwell first — covered in aluminum foil and filled with animal figurines — and chalked it up to a neighbor's whimsy.

Then a Facebook post pointed us to a second box at the Western station, this one a bit more ponderous (and clearly missing several of its components, if the residual pools of dried glue are any indicator).

Box in the plaza outside the Western Brown Line station. [DNAinfo/Patty Wetli]

While the two differ wildly in tone and execution, both are vaguely reminiscent of the work of Joseph Cornell, who more or less invented "box construction" as an art form, creating "poetic theaters" from found objects. Cornell boxes have long been popular with collectors, be it individuals or institutions, including New York's Museum of Modern Art.

Mystery boxes in Lincoln Square are reminiscent of the work of artist Joseph Cornell. [Museum of Modern Art]

In the absence of an artist's signature or any other identifier, we're left to wonder: Are the boxes the work of the same person/people, or is it purely coincidental that the tableaus turned up at roughly the same time?

If you have any clues or theories, we're all ears.

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