Neighborhood master gardeners helped artist Cyd Smillie as she crafted a mural with honeycombs, bees and blooms on the viaduct at 4600 W. Irving Park Road in Portage Park .

The president of the nonprofit Arts Alive Chicago, Smillie, of Mayfair, has painted and overseen dozens of murals around Chicago. On a whim, she applied to do this one, which Portage Park business Novak Construction commissioned. Then she got the assignment, and about 65 neighborhood residents joined her in the summer of 2022 to paint the whimsical flowers and protected pollinators on the south wall of the viaduct.

“It was really about color and beauty and the bees,” she says.

Artist Cyd Smillie says in Chicago some murals “are political, and some are purely beautiful, and most are somewhere in between.”

The flowers, including gerbera daisies and African violets, “were chosen for size and colors and contours,” Smillie says. The bees were added to recognize their shrinking population.

The 10-foot-tall mural stretches 100 feet.

This wasn’t her first mural under the viaduct. Across the street, in 2021, she helped artist Jill Arena paint a robin, blue jay and goldfinch — birds that often run into high-rise windows and suffer from disease. That mural was commissioned by the Old Irving Park and Six Corners associations, with consultation from local members of the Audubon Society.

Across the street from the bees mural, artist Cyd Smillie helped artist Jill Arena paint a birds mural in 2021.

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Smillie says she’s proud to be a muralist in Chicago, a city where some murals “are political, and some are purely beautiful, and most are somewhere in between.”

They don’t look like travel brochures or textbook art, she says.

She’s also proud that “women muralists are creating the world we forget to see,” often recognizing nature in locations that otherwise lack it, she says.

Smillie was nervous about the detailed work involved in painting the honeycombs, she says, but “a couple high school girls just locked into those,” and they were done in record time.

Working with schools and students is a passion, and she was glad to have them involved. Her recent work involves painting murals at Haugen Elementary, and she teaches after-school programs at Hibbard Elementary, both in Albany Park. She considers murals and street art as a form of “artistic literacy” for students who might not have a chance to study art in school or have an opportunity to visit the city’s renowned museums.

High school students helped artist Cyd Smillie the detailed work involved in painting the honeycombs.

Now she’s working with students who don’t speak English as a first language, and is learning all the terminology for painting, drawing and art techniques in Spanish, she says.

Learning art can help students in unpredictable ways, she says. It “tells you how to lay out your science fair project or class presentations,” among other skills.

Chicago’s murals & mosaics