UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Folayemi Wilson, associate dean for access and equity and professor of art in Penn State's College of Arts and Architecture, was selected by the Chicago Transit Authority in 2019 to create a mural for a new Green Line train station in Chicago’s Near West Side neighborhood, adding to the extensive gallery of public art throughout the city’s transit system.
The work, titled “Promise (for tomorrow from the past looking to the future),” is a large tile mosaic suspended within a glass atrium at the station’s entrance. It shows young people of color — depicted in images from local historical archives — walking across a Midwestern prairie under a partly cloudy sky.
“It was quite an honor not only to be selected by the City of Chicago for this project, but as an artist and designer, to contribute work as a part of revitalizing a neighborhood important to Chicago history and that has been long neglected as far as its underlying infrastructure – in this case, essential transportation services,” said Wilson, who was an administrator and faculty member at Columbia College Chicago before coming to Penn State in 2021. “My creative practice, like my work at Penn State, is concerned with equity, the uplifting of marginalized communities, and systems of repair that work toward ensuring all communities have the same opportunities to thrive,” she added.
The new station was designed by architecture firm Perkins & Will. The last time the area had an “L” stop was in 1948. Development has mostly focused on luxury housing, hotels and high-end restaurants, overlooking the needs of the neighborhood’s working-class and less-resourced residents. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson noted in his remarks at the station’s dedication ceremonies in October that the station is a “transformative achievement.”
“We take another step in our city’s journey to reverse the historic disinvestment of this community," noted Johnson. "Accessible, reliable, affordable public transit is how we connect people on the Near West Side to opportunities beyond their neighborhoods. This long-awaited CTA station is a transformative achievement.”
In the mural, Wilson considers the migration of racial and ethnic groups that moved in and out of the area in the 19th century. The piece references the pioneering work of Florence Kelly, contracted by the U.S. Labor Bureau, who went door-to-door during a hot summer in 1892 to collect demographic data on the area’s social and working conditions, which included sweatshops and factories that exploited child labor. Originally occupied by the Anishinaabe —Three Fires Confederacy of the Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi, and other Indigenous nations, African Americans settled in the area as early as the 1830s, and were later joined by the Irish, Germans, Czechs, Bohemians and French. After the fire of 1871, they were replaced by Russian and Polish Jews, Italians, Greeks, Mexicans and a second wave of African Americans during the Great Migration.
Kelly’s report was published as “Hull House Maps and Papers,” along with essays and sets of maps color-coded, as referenced in the mural, according to wage distribution, race and ethnicity. Kelly’s work ultimately led to the establishment of social work as a discipline, instigated stricter working conditions in sweatshops and introduced an early example of effective infographics — a field that is now its own discipline in contemporary design practice.
According to Wilson, the mural — situated at the base of the escalator leading up to an elevated platform — is asking, “What is over the horizon of the Midwestern prairie? And, what new Near West Side might the group of young people be walking towards? What future Chicago might the Green Line take them to?”
The station opened shortly before the Democratic National Convention in August, which was held a few blocks away at the United Center. Wilson said, “I imagined delegates getting off at the station being inspired by the work as they set off to do theirs.”