Bus Stop Paintings is a series of watercolor paintings that seeks to capture the vernacular architecture of immigrant and working class neighborhoods. These paintings are my attempt to catalog hand-painted signs, common brick, sun and shadow, metal grates, old window displays, architectural terra cotta, hand-written notes on front doors, the stains, spots, and gunk on sidewalks, and the layers of care and tenderness that accumulate in buildings over the years. I began this series when I lived in Denver, and continued it when I moved to West Texas and then back to my hometown of Chicago. Along the way I have also painted buildings in Mexico, Spain, and Occupied Palestine.

Many of the shops I have painted are now, just a few years later, gone. Others, like Laundryland, Dollar Plus, or 2617 W. North Ave, have lost their distinct signage. Most of the others are threatened by the steady march of time and the autonomic workings of real estate and finance capital. But I hope these paintings are celebrations, not death masks. They are snapshots of a specific moment in the life of a building: when the paint on a sign was chipped just so, when a curtain was drawn across a window, when a note was taped to a door. I’d like these watercolors to serve as a record of this city’s beauty and the architectural treasures, inset like precious stones, on even our humblest stretch of street. 

It’s also impossible to talk about these paintings without acknowledging that many of the neighborhoods they depict have, in recent months, been violently targeted by the State. From Little Village to Hermosa, immigrants and immigrant communities across Chicago have been preyed upon by ICE and CBP agents carrying out the blood and soil nativism of our Federal government. They are shattering families, caging children, kidnapping workers, and they have killed people. These attacks on immigrants are attacks on the entire working class, and I worry that some of these neighborhoods will never fully recover.

The art critic John Berger wrote that “Photography is the process of rendering observations self-conscious.” These watercolors are an attempt to take part in that same process; and I hope they remind you to notice, appreciate, and defend the richly decorated buildings and neighborhoods around us, before they’re gone.