The mural that Tyrue “Slang” Jones painted last fall on the shabby-chic wood-plank facade of Wicker Park’s Violet Hour lounge was a traffic stopper: a twilight-hued, larger-than-life nightclub scene that posed curvaceous women in slinky gowns and a couple of strangely reptilian little waiters against heavy drapery and a backdrop spangled with sea horses. At one end, a fanged Mickey Mouse seemed to lunge across a swooping piano keyboard, his giant gloved hands proffering an upturned hat. A mix of vintage animation style and masterly graffiti, the piece suggested Prohibition-era sex, greed, exploitation, and excess, brought into the present with touches like a glove decoration that echoed the logos of the Wu-Tang Clan and McDonald’s.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
So he didn’t believe an acquaintance he bumped into, soon after the work had been completed, who told him that it’d been painted over and was gone. “I said, ‘No, it hasn’t, that can’t be true,’” he recalls, adding that Madia had told him that the average duration for a mural was three months. But when Jones went to look for himself, sure enough, he found a pale blue blank where his work had been. In its finished state, the mural had been up only three weeks.
“To tell you the truth, I put everything I had into it,” he says. “I was months behind on my rent, no jobs coming through, and I wanted to use it as kind of advertisement.” In a budget proposal he e-mailed to Madia on October 12, Jones wrote that as a “promotional entity, the mural would run through the winter months, (alleviating the need to find subsequent murals to be filled during those months).” That was his understanding, he says, but no contract was ever signed and he never got anything in writing that stated how long the mural would stay up.
Jones’s mural, he says, was “a take on the service industry.” The waiters were “minstrel characters” and “chameleons,” and the theme was “how anyone of the working class has to serve the ruling class in America, the glamorous people who are comfortable. One of the owners told me that he wanted something controversial, but maybe, when they really looked at it, it was like I was knocking their business.”
Jones says there won’t be a return engagement. “The mural came down as soon as I finished it, with no warning. I didn’t even have a chance to take final pictures. I feel like all my work was done in vain. It’s like the mural that never was.”
