The Seeing Black Gallery: Chicago Murals

By The Red-Eye Crew
SeeingBlack.com Contributing Writers

The people and objects in Jeff Zimmermann's large-scale murals brighten and inform the mid-West Side of Chicago, where he lives and works. Filled with photo-realistic faces, objects of social meaning and sometimes puzzling wordplay in various languages, Zimmermann creates the murals as political commentary that is often not easily understood and therefore sometimes considered less than effective. As one of the few White folks in the area, the 31-year-old artist draws stares from the curious when atop his scaffolding painting the works, which he completes for free with his own materials.

"I describe my mural work as realism with content, Zimmermann says. "The subjects of my work are people caught by my camera. Everyday people who become symbols for their statement or the associations they create through their actions. I try to explore smaller more subtle emotions and feelings. The twenty-second television commercial mode of thinking can not be applied to my work. Real issues and ideas are fuzzy and hard make conclusions about. There is also something incredible about work that has no owner and is subservient to its physical environment.

"Patterns are pulled from real life to add structure, but also stand for the place or thing they were taken from," he says. The work can be read like a poem or a puzzle. The various pieces whether collaged, painted or written, give clues for arriving at some level of understanding. Text is incorporated to clarify feeling and content. Spanish, Arabic, Spanglish, Swahili even Braille play roles in interpretation. Some text has a different meaning when heard as opposed to simply read. I want the audience to be rewarded for making associations."

Zimmermann has also painted murals in Kenya and South America.

-- March 14, 2002

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