Chicago murals: Artist Blake Lenoir's rose mural in West Side dedicated to sex workers

Jocelyn Woodards was driving from her new home in West Garfield Park to the Loop for morning yoga class when she noticed women standing in the middle of West Madison Street.

“I’m thinking, ‘Cars go on the street, people go on the sidewalks,’ ” Woodards says. “Why are these women not on the sidewalks? I was clutching my pearls, going what the f is happening.”

Woodards quickly put together that her new home, which she bought to be near her mother in North Lawndale, was also near a stretch of West Madison Street that has been a sex worker "hot spot” for decades.

She also noticed her new neighborhood had little public art.

So Woodards set out to commission a mural dedicated to the sex workers on West Madison Street. The result is inspired by Tupac Shakur's poem "The Rose That Grew From Concrete.”

“The public art, it lends a sense of vibrancy to me," Woodards says. Where there's art, it shows that "people who live there, they care about their neighborhood.”

Woodards is a senior field representative for the National AFL-CIO. She serves as a community organizer, was a delegate at Chicago's recent Democratic National Convention and has worked on staff of U.S. five presidential campaigns. She's used to getting things done. Still, it took three years to secure the necessary permissions and city funding to create the mural.

This past summer, artist Blake Lenoir painted it on a stretch of viaduct and neighboring fence along West Madison Street at South Kenton Avenue on the Austin and West Garfield Park border. The west end of the mural is filled with roses pressed against each other, with women's eyes and lips appearing in gaps in the flowers. Butterflies float along the top, taking flight from the bouquet. The roses’ green vines curl and twist along the white wall as it stretches east under the viaduct, dotted with red rose buds. A neighboring fence reads, “A (rose illustration) is still a rose,” with vines, buds and a flower punctuating the stretch.

Lenoir says he created the mural to “illustrate the struggle and history of the area, but also the beauty that struggle has bred." He says he sought to “highlight the history of prostitution and bloodshed that has happened in the area over the years.”

It took him about a month to complete the project.

Lenoir compares the roses in his mural to the sex workers on West Madison Street, most of them African American women, selling their bodies. Whether the rose is in full bloom, closed up tight or growing up out of the concrete, it’s still a rose.

As the oldest brother with four sisters who grew up with a single mom, Lenoir says he “can truly appreciate the encompassing vision and element that (Woodards) wanted to achieve in this project.”

Queen Hibbler, communications and media board director of Sex Worker Outreach Project Chicago, said she also identifies with Shakur's poem.

"The way that Lenoir frames the faces of the Black women with roses makes me think that these women are the roses that grew from the concrete," Hibbler says. "Despite being faced with the adversity of their circumstances, they are still able to get up and be the beautiful beings that they are."

"I find it to be reassuring that there is an artist that is willing to acknowledge such a marginalized group of people that are always being penalized just for existing," Hibbler says of Lenoir and the mural.

Woodards says the mural is also important to recognize the imminent change facing the neighborhood, as new development around the United Center inevitably stretches west with gentrification.

“We’re right at the top of the gentrification that’s coming into our neighborhood,” Woodards says. “If you look at Black neighborhoods, that’s what happens. Rather than being improved, they get displaced.”

“Any roses that grow over there have been through tremendous obstacles in order to emerge as a rose," she says. "They’ve gone through so many obstacles that are defining. The women are the same. These are people who have been thrown away by society. Almost no one cares about them. So, our mural is dedicated to them."