Where Amazing Happens (Hyde Park - Chicago)

The name of this course is "If These Walls Could Talk," and surrounds its curriculum around historic artistic views and defining "mural." For the first Action Project of my Humanities course this Elective Term, we had to create a drawn piece of art work that signifies what our chosen neighborhood needs. For example: if someone's chosen neighborhood has a violence problem, maybe they can draw a no shooting picture. We also have to tie this back in to what we have been learning by utilizing historic styles of art. We have to also utilize our mind and think of symbolic ways to get our point across, which is my favorite part of the project. I chose to pick the Hyde Park neighborhood because I currently live there and it's one of my favorite places to be. Researching the neighborhood was pretty easy because it's widely known as a pretty important place in Chicago. This made my project flow pretty smoothly because I could easily research what I had to.

DR. "Where Amazing Happens," Nov 30, 2015

DNR
11/2015
Where Amazing Happens
Pencil on paper 11” x 14”

In my art piece, you can clearly see the the statement in the middle of the drawing. It says "Where Amazing Happens," and if you look closely you can see "Hyde Park" faded in the background. The intended message that I hope to get across is that greatness has came out of the Hyde Park neighborhood, so this is inspiration for people my age and younger to be something great, no matter what neighborhood you're from. From my research, I realized a lack of education in Hyde Park, as the main school there, Kenwood Academy High School, has a 50% reading proficiency rate and 40% mathematics proficiency rate. These are fairly average numbers for a CPS High School, but I believe my neighborhood can do better! This serves a problem to me, because the worse this situation gets, the more kids on the streets, which means more killings and all types of other bad stuff. 

If you look closely, you can see my horizon line, drawn through the middle of the drawing, this is where the eyes of my viewer are first drawn to. There are also buildings throughout the drawing with a long path that has a vanishing point. I tried to create this art as a tribute to Hyde Park and simply, all the greatness that comes out of my neighorhood, with shoutouts to Mary Lincoln, Barack Obama, Muhammad Ali, Erne Duncan, and Vic Mensa. These are all people that are and have done great things. 

I colored my drawing accordingly to the color of each symbol. So, the Save Money symbol is red, so I colored it red, and Ali's gloves were usually red or gold, so I colored them red as well.