Start United States USA — Art The seed in this Pilsen mural is meant to signify the neighborhood’s...

The seed in this Pilsen mural is meant to signify the neighborhood’s growth

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Mexican artist Raul Sisniega, who did the painting in 2021, says the resilience of Pilsen residents was “something worth talking about” in the mural.
The 14-feet-tall, 40-feet-long mural spans a brick wall of All Care Dental, 1918 S. Blue Island Ave., and features reality-bending Mexican imagery meant to represent the neighborhood and its origins as a Mexican American enclave.
“I heard stories from older people, like first-generation Mexicans in Pilsen, of how they got there and all the difficulties they had to struggle with and then, like 40 years later, see how it grew,” says Sisniega, 42, who lives in Mexico City. “To me, it was something worth talking about.”
Sisniega says he spent two weeks checking out Pilsen before getting to work in 2021 on “Semilla,” which is Spanish for “seed.”
“I think it’s important to understand the context of where you’re going to paint so that you don’t act like an invader,” Sisniega says.
The mural fades in from a series of pixels — to represent the various aspects that make up a person, the history behind them and those who came before. The bits come together to form a profile of a face.
“I was thinking about a nonbinary character with brown skin that is created by the pixels of their history,” Sisniega says. “Like a young person created by the stories of the past, each story being a pixel.”
Also emerging from the pixels: a pair of brown hands, planting the bean seed that grows to become the rest of the mural.

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