I recently spotted this mosaic sculpture in front of Mather High School on the far north side of Chicago (on Lincoln between Bryn Mawr and Peterson.) I took advantage of a brief thaw to take some pictures and walk the grounds of the school on a day off. The sculpture is an abstracted organic statue, marrying figural, floral and solar forms. In contrast to the dreary gray of winter, the sculpture appeared almost celebratory, a figure with a sun symbol at its heart. The piece resembles a crude, more highly decorative version of the well known Miro sculpture "Sun, Moon, Stars and Earth" (affectionately referred to as 'Miss Chicago') across from the Chicago Picasso downtown. It has a playfully juvenile style, appropriate enough for its site in front of a school, as do the two cast-concrete planter boxes nearby, which appear to be made by the same artist who made "The Angel of Halsted" panels at Division and Halsted. The sculpture is simple in its strategy and succeeds insofar as it decorates the front entrance of a bleak utilitarian box school building, and symbolically communicates a warmth at the heart of a figure.
The images on the planter boxes are animals and plants, speaking to a lushness of growth and vibrancy of life I only hope the children attending this sparsely landscaped urban school can imagine. The brown plants in the boxes perhaps stand for those students, quietly dormant in the winter cold, but very much alive below the surface. The planters and the sculpture stand for their future hopes for Chicago, then, picturing a vision of warmth and verdancy that only their efforts to build a greener, more sustainable Chicago will achieve. Neither high school students nor artists can "make" trees, but they can give trees more places to grow, and they can make our city better by far. This sculpture suggests they have only to plant sunshine in their hearts and the future will be green, no matter how gray the present.
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