Painting a mural under the Purple Line takes Jordan Nickel back to his Evanston roots (2024)

Growing up in Evanston near the Noyes Street L stop, Jordan Nickel says the CTA Purple Line was his “lifeline to the city.”

The budding artist took the train around Chicago, admiring graffiti before he started painting. So, when Lea Pinsky and Dustin Harris at Evanston’s Art Encounter commissioned him to paint a mural earlier this year, the location was perfect: It was on the wall at 828 Noyes St. under the Purple Line tracks.

“It has such deep personal history with me,” says Nickel, who goes by the artist name POSE. “It’s insanely cool that they asked me to paint here.”

Photo provided by Lea Pinsky

Nickel, now living on the North Side, uses an abstract, comic book style.

“I’m not literal. It’s like a puzzle for viewers,” he says.

Hidden in the mural, which spans 85 feet, is the phrase “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.” Nickel says that slogan pays tribute to the DIY youth subculture he grew up in and Evanston’s reputation as a “big idea place.”

With stacks of books and a burning candle on them, it also pays tribute to the Northwestern University students who frequent the stop as they come and go from campus.

Genevieve Bookwalter

Nickel painted his first mural under train tracks across Noyes Street from his new mural location, he says. So, in his newest creation, a fire hydrant with colorful paint gushing out of it — like water on a summer day — represents the mind of “a kid who wants to explore and create,” he says. An extension cord and outlet represent the “search for a creative outlet as a youth” to plug oneself into. The male facial features could represent a father figure, an authority figure or a “crazy old professor,” Nickel says, depending on the viewer’s interpretation.

A purple cardinal perches at eye level, because a friend mentioned, “ ‘It would be great to have some birds.’ I’ve never painted a bird in my life,” Nickel says. But as he listened to birds twittering while he painted, he was moved by feelings of safety and serenity that he says they inspired. Next thing he knew, “the bird just appeared there. It just happened,” he chuckled.

Lea Pinsky, executive director for Art Encounter, says Nickel painted an Evanston mural in 2019 that didn’t last, and her group was glad to bring him back for a new mural on the side of Stacked and Folded restaurant.

Then-mayor Richard M. Daley asked city crews to remove street art, graffiti and tagging by covering it with brown paint or blasting it with high pressure hoses. While city officials still remove graffiti, they also maintain a database of graffiti, murals and public art that residents don’t want taken down.

“Since I grew up in that, color has always been a revolutionary and emotional reaction,” Nickel says. “Can you imagine a garden, like the (Chicago) Botanic Garden, in all brown tones? It’s a way to engage the human spirit.”