Artist hopes mural of victim makes others pause
A golden frame filled with the cosmos went up on a brick building near the Western Blue Line. Its creator, speckled in paint, finished off glints of light on the stars. In a few clean lines, he wrote, “memorial mural in progress.”
For longtime Chicago artist Tyrue “Slang” Jones, the project was personal.
Brandon McGhee, 23, was walking near that wall in June, after a hot summer day spent visiting his mom, when hewas shot and killed in one of the most violent weekends Chicago has seen in recent years. McGhee went to the same grammar school as Jones’ kids. McGhee’s mother, LaDonna Lane, was an old family friend.
McGhee would have turned 24 earlier this month. Since then, visitors have stopped by the mural to drop off flowers, light a candle or spend some time with thoughts of McGhee.
“I was just honored to be able to do it,” Jones said. “When I sit back and look at it, it’s something that I’m proud of.”
Jones remembers McGhee as a young kid, looking out for one of his daughters who would watch the after- school basketball games. McGhee was more worried about keeping her safe from rogue hoop shots than the game.
“Everyone says I’m judgmental,” Jones joked. “I like to just say I’m observant. I pay attention to details, that’s why I paint.” But he never found fault with McGhee. “I remember him always being just such a cool kid.”
When Jones learned of McGhee’s death, he said he “lost all the air” out of his chest. And when he learned Lane hoped to memorialize her son with amural, hewas all in.
McGhee and Lane were best friends, Jones said. “That boy was close to his mother.”
Lane sent photos of her son. Jones practiced draw
ings. He thought about the afterlife, what’s up there in the clouds, space.
“It’s like a story,” Jones said, about the beginnings of creating the mural. “To sit down and write a story, you kind of have a basic idea.”
He worked in the days leading up to and after the election, sometimes through tears as he thought of McGhee, and finished just in time for what would have been his 24th birthday. As friends and family came to visit the memorial, they broke into applause for the
artist as he was trying to sneak away.
Alex Garcia watched as the mural came closer and closer to looking like his friend.
“I was kind of scared at first. I was like, man, I don’t know,” Garcia said. “But (Slang) did such a great job. I couldn’t even look at it for too long at first because it just reminded me so much of him.
“All the smallest details, memories popping up inmy head,” Garcia said. Like all the basketball games. And
what itwould be like to play one more time.
“He was someone you could always depend on,” Garcia said. “Someone that was always going to be there for you, never turn his back on you.”
Khalil Williams, who met McGhee in high school and was with him in his final moments, planned to visit the mural with friends.
McGhee was “pretty good at anything that he put his mind to,” Williams said, and “a beautiful soul.” When he thinks of McGhee he thinks
of his work ethic, his fashion, his music, all the good times. The mural is a testament to McGhee’s character, Williams said. “Even though he was here for a short time — the amount of people that he touched, the amount of people that he loved, that he helped.”
Since McGhee’s death, everything “weighs heavy,” Williams said.
“It always just hits me a certain type of way,” he said. “I don’t want to do that alone — that pain, that emptiness, that sorrow. I don’t want to go through that alone. So I’m going to have people with me. And I’ll probably bring something that he enjoyed.… And just stay right there with him for a while.”
In the mural’s final version, McGhee floats out of space; his name reaches past the top corner. A note in neon says: “His light shines forever.”
“It’s a thing that I usually say to friends when people are passing, when they’re mourning, is that light is forever,” Jones said. “I believe everything is connected.”
Jones grew up in Wicker Park when gangs were “terrible” and said he had his share of close calls. He remembers some of the guys who gave him, a kid who spent a lot of his time drawing, a hard time, and also how many of them changed as years went by.
“The sadness in these random acts of gun violence is these few seconds not only are taking someone away permanently, from something that everyone could have walked away from,” he said. But there are “so many people touched.”
“There’s not one person that gets buried or moves on or gets killed in some act of gun violence that wasn’t deeply loved,” he said.
Jones said maybe the mural could get someone to think and pause and change course before harming another person. In all the time he spent spraying each burst of the galaxy, he wondered if someone tied to that June day walked right by him. Or who might see a photo of the mural on their phone from someone grabbing a shot for Instagram.
Even if the mural only makes one person’s heart smile, Jones said, it was worth it.
“And that one person, mostly, is LaDonna. I really wanted to do right by his mother because that’s her only baby,” he said.
Lane said she loves the mural. She brings flowers when she visits. Friends stopping by send her pictures. Someone keeps lighting the candles. On Sunday, a few flickered near McGhee’s portrait, as the train barreled on overhead.
“One of the reasons to have the mural was for us — for myself, my family and Brandon’s friends — to be able to have this as a process to grieve,” Lane said. “Another reason tohave the mural is because I want people to know what happened to Brandon, and that there was an innocent life taken.
“I want people to know who hewas.”