You’ve probably seen Justus Roe’s murals around Chicago.
Maybe it’s from an Orange or Green Line train through the South Loop, on a massive towering wall at 1001 S. State Street. Or maybe it’s under the viaduct at Metra’s new Peterson/Ridge station. Or maybe it’s on the fence fronting a vacant lot on Western Avenue in Lincoln Square — so old the paint is peeling, but you recognize the colorful, feathery style.
Or maybe you wandered into the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and stopped to take in the 65-by-15-foot canvas painting at the entrance.
A Chicago native, Roe painted his first mural with fellow artists on a CTA retaining wall in the 1990s, and he continues to adorn the streets of his hometown with his unique and improvisational style.
He finished his largest mural in 2016 on a residential building at 1001 S. State Street. He also painted the alley outside the old Neo nightclub in Lincoln Park, residential garages in a variety of Chicago neighborhoods, and his first full building facade at East 72nd Street at South Exchange Avenue in South Shore.
And the list goes on.
It was “the golden age of Chicago graffiti painting” when he grew up, Roe says, “which influenced and drove me to seek out opportunities to create public artwork.”
He was a student in two Gallery 37 Center for the Arts summer job programs, working with artists Alejandro Romero and Ivan Watkins on a massive panel mural in Grant Park on Michigan Avenue. That mural now is in the CTA pedestrian corridor at O’Hare International Airport.
Roe traveled down I-57 to earn his bachelor of fine arts at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and went to New York for his master of fine arts at Columbia University. But his hometown drew him back, and he continued to paint. And paint.
Ald. Andre Vasquez, who represents Chicago’s 40th Ward, knew Roe long before his career in politics. Now he reaches out to his old friend when he sees opportunities for public art.
“Justus and I go way back to when I was a rapper and he was a DJ,” Vasquez says. Now, Roe’s work is featured on the viaducts along Ravenswood from Foster to Devon avenues in Vasquez’s ward. Last year’s mural at the new Peterson/Ridge Metra station is just the latest.
“To be able to partner with a 40th Ward neighbor in this manner, that brings so much creativity and beauty to our ward, is something I’m immensely proud of,” Vasquez said.
Roe’s work often has colorful, geometric feathers coming together and breaking apart over the span of his wall or canvas. Sometimes he uses a brilliant neon palate, and other times he uses a more muted approach with tones of brown and soft orange. Often his designs are somewhere between the two. His works are typically “unplanned and created primarily in situ,” he says.
His style has evolved over three decades, and “comes from my exploration of painting, mark making and sculpture, drawing inspiration from foundational wildstyle aesthetics, post-war abstract art, architecture, city design, geometry and landscapes.”
Roe adapts his aesthetic to fit his pieces’ environment, whether it’s an industrial space, neighborhood garage, corporate office or art gallery. He takes the audience, community, environment and history of each space into consideration as he plans his newest works, especially with public art.
Chicago photographer, writer and former gallery owner Susan Aurinko says she first worked with Roe when she placed four, 8-by-12-foot panels of his artwork in the lobby of One Prudential Plaza around 2010 for a temporary display. He showed up with his dad to install them, she says, typical of his humble personality.
Aurinko calls Roe’s style “edgy but refined.”
“His sense of color is really spectacular,” Aurinko says. “His colors have such good dialogue.”
Roe’s murals are never done, he says. That’s why an old mural might suddenly look touched up, or expanded.
“I approach painting as an ongoing dialogue with the location,” says Roe, who declined to be photographed for this story. “If possible, I try to continue to work on and evolve the paintings over time, responding to natural decay and environmental changes. They are never really completed. Every opportunity produces a unique work, but each piece is very much an extension and evolution of the last.”
