My new article for OnlySky Media is a memoir of my year-long experiment in public art/memorial:
In 2015 I moved to Rogers Park, and during the Summer Solstice of 2021 was inspired to join the Artists of the Wall project. I painted my roughly four-foot section of the wall a midnight blue, and upon that field I inscribed, in silver, a line paraphrased from Carolyn Forché’s poem The Museum of Stones:
“…with hope that this assemblage of rubble would become a shrine …”
The unorthodox next step was to take advantage of the Art Wall’s bench-style construction by scattering about twenty items found on the adjacent beach upon the flat top surface of the bench structure. Pieces of driftwood, interesting stones, bricks that had been tumbled around in Lake Michigan for who knows how long—these were the building blocks.
I wondered what would happen next.