When Jason Messinger was commissioned to do murals at the three stationhouses at the CTA Blue Line’s Illinois Medical District stop, he started brainstorming. What sorts of medical images could he weave into his work?
“I was trying to go down a rabbit hole of ‘I’m going to make it about medical science and X-rays and botany,’ and then I realized, oh, no one who’s going to get medical care wants to be reminded of anything like that.”
So the Chicago artist, who specializes in tile murals and sculpture, shifted gears.
“Instead, my goal would be for people to look at this for 30 seconds and transport them on a mini-vacation of the mind,” Messinger says. “Each mural is an abstract idea of a vacation destination.”
His murals hang in the three station houses at the Illinois Medical District stop, which runs along the middle of the Eisenhower Expressway on the West Side.
The district just south of there is home to Rush University Medical Center, the University of Illinois Hospital, Stroger, Hospital and the Jesse Brown VA Medical Center. The FBI’s Chicago offices are nearby, too.
“It’s my city, so I went a little overboard,” Messinger says. “I made five murals for the three station houses.”
The murals are composed of 12-by-12-inch black porcelain tiles that look like slate or stone. Messinger chose those to stand up to the weather in a space that isn’t quite outdoors but isn’t quite indoors, either. Colored glazes fill Messinger’s carvings in the porcelain.
The largest mural, titled “Vista,” is a nighttime mountain landscape with twinkling stars and the outline of mountains carved into the black porcelain tiles. It stretches 11 feet by 4 feet horizontally across the wall at the main Ogden Avenue station house.
Adjacent to it is Messinger’s “Beach” mural, a 4-by-4-foot tiled square. Straight, wavy and curvy horizontal lines are carved across the black porcelain and colored with blue, beige and white hues to represent water, sand, sky and clouds.
His 5-by-4-foot mural “Garden” at the Paulina Street station house has yellow and green lines bursting across the tiles and rainbow-colored dots at their tips to represent flowers.
His 4-by-4 mural “Sun” in the Damen Avenue station house has circles and flames in reds, oranges and yellow exploding from the black tile.
The 4-by-4 fifth mural, “Waterfall/Moon,” has vertical lines in blues and whites, with white curls representing a full moon over a waterfall at night.
“If someone goes, ‘Oh, pretty,’ and is transported away from their worries or fears of medical care or even FBI appointments, that meets my goal,” Messenger says.
The murals were installed in 2018 as part of a $23 million station renovation on the Blue Line’s Forest Park branch.
The murals are five of more than 80 pieces of public art and significant architectural detail displayed throughout the CTA system, which has been installing more murals, mosaics and sculptures in recent years. The CTA announced plans this month for new artwork at Red Line stations in Edgewater and Uptown.
Messenger says he applied to do CTA public art installations, and this $100,000 project was the first he’s been commissioned to do.
The artist, who has a studio in the Cornelia Arts Building on the North Side, also has done work that can be seen in the Chicago Public Library’s Austin-Irving Branch, the College of Lake County-Waukegan and in corporate offices and private collections around the world.
