Chicago murals: Back of the Yards art lights viaduct, creates beauty and safety

Bursting with color and light, a Back of the Yards railroad viaduct might be one of the brightest in Chicago.

A mural titled “Woven Together” adorns the viaduct and walkway at South Ashland Avenue and 49th Street. It's an artistic collaboration of West Town-based Luftwerk, including lighting artists Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero, and South Lawndale muralist Gloria “Gloe” Talamantes.

The result is a seemingly shape-shifting piece that accentuates the 19th-century viaduct’s architecture while illuminating the walkway and making it safer for pedestrians.

“It is a project that I’m extremely proud of,” says Talamantes, who has worked various jobs in Back of the Yards for about 20 years. The viaduct walls are painted in neon-color designs, and at night the walls are lit up.

Between the lights and the painting, ”it gives the impression that the design changes. It looks like it’s a moving or flowing type of design,” Talamantes says.

Bachmaier says, “The goal was to create a safe passage and make it a safe place where everybody would enjoy walking through and connecting to each other, transforming the urban experience. [It’s] weaving together communities, neighbors and people.”

Indeed, “Woven Together” is intended to celebrate “the rich history and diverse community of Back of the Yards,” according to the city of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events website. The agency commissioned the piece.

Talamantes says she held workshops around the surrounding neighborhoods and had residents of all ages weaving together different colors and pieces of paper, flowers, ribbon and whatever else they could think of to lace around each other. She then took those weavings to her studio and plotted the mural’s design, using them as inspiration.

Talamantes is no stranger to murals or color theory, but this was her first time working with lighting design, she says. She took the neon colors she was considering to Luftwerk’s studio to see how they worked under the planned light display before painting the piece on the walls.

She had other considerations, too, like making sure drivers weren’t distracted by the neon colors and appearance of shifting lights.

As a result, “I did different variations of the same design. We decided which ones we thought would work and not clash with the people or the traffic.”

Bachmaier and Gallero installed lights to illuminate the walkway and the mural, as well as accent lights to “play with the architecture features” of the viaduct, which was completed in 1939.

“It’s historic,” Bachmaier says. “Some of these underpasses and viaducts have a really vibrant design. It’s nice to be part of an initiative that realizes this.”

But the project was a challenge, too, as “we consider light as art and a decoration for a space, not as a utility,” Bachmaier says. “There it had to have both functions, utility plus the creative aesthetics we were after. That was a stretch for us.”

It was a stretch the collaborative team pulled off. The project opened last year, almost three years after it began.

Seeing it completed “was so gratifying,” Bachmaier says. “It was worth all the effort.”