On a hot summer day in 2011, mural artist Jonathan Franklin was up on a ladder next to the Green Line tracks, working on a project for the Oak Park Area Arts Council. As Franklin recently recalled, a homeless man named Mike approached him and asked to help. Franklin accepted the offer, and they got to work.

Franklin described Mike’s work as “meticulous. He was also really well put together.” “It was a very sweet experience,” Franklin said. 

The final project, which Franklin titled “The Three Mikes,” is one of about 240 murals running along the CTA retaining wall from Harlem to Ridgeland avenues. The Mini Mural Project, started by the Oak Park Area Arts Council in 2010, features work by a wide variety of artists. 

Every summer, artists add about 20 new ones, finishing up their work before Labor Day. 

In 2025, a record 30 murals were painted by 30 different artists from all different walks of life, according to Camille Wilson White, Arts Council executive director. Artists are invited to apply for an opportunity to paint a mural in early spring and will be chosen by the decision of an anonymous jury. They are given $1,500 for needed materials and can keep the remaining balance.

Public art gives artists the opportunity to express themselves through a permanent installation that is free and accessible to anyone passing by. For Wilson White, the variety of art styles among the murals is part of the appeal. “It just looks very cool, and in my mind, when you have a concentration of them, all together, all different kinds of art,” she said.

The first two murals were painted in 2010 by collaborators Mike Glascott and Jeff Lee on South Boulevard, east of the Oak Park Avenue train station. The image portrays a stack of books, with a person sitting on top of the stack, and a child looking upwards towards the book stack. 

About 700 applications are submitted each year, according to Wilson White, but only 30 are chosen. Multi-skilled artist Jonathan Franklin has painted 10 murals for the Mini Mural project since its start, as well as a handful of non-related murals for Hepzibah, also along the train tracks. 

Franklin brings long experience to his work. He got his start in his mid 20s as a mural artist while on a Kibbutz in Israel, where he painted Japanese waves on the stairway walls leading down to a disco. 

His artistic style is inspired by German expressionism and cubism, with some dissonance. “It sort of evolves. It evolves organically,” he said. “I don’t really have literal ideas as to what I’m going to do.” 

He described his process by saying, “I ask questions and I solve problems. It’s like I live in the past to create the present.”

Another artist is Dominique Ashanti, who explained how her experience in Trinity High School’s International Baccalaureate Art and Design Program shaped her career as an artist. “It really gave me the opportunity to explore so many different mediums, and to be around other creative individuals,” Ashanti said. 

Living in California, looking for a reason to move back to Illinois, Ashanti took her Mini Mural application as “the perfect opportunity to get back into exploring my artistry,” she said. 

Ashant’s mural “Imagination Is Limitless,” located along South Boulevard near Oak Park Avenue, showcases an abstract painting of a woman surrounded by an abstract swirl of train tracks and plants. 

Ashanti had planned to attend college for a concentration in Illustration, but ended up receiving a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts. This unexpected alteration in her college career was also a theme in her mural. 

“It speaks to the nonlinear path that we take through life. Sometimes we try to plan it out, and it never actually manifests in that way,” Ashanti said. Creating it brought a measure of peace. “It’s the medicine and the meditation that rejuvenates me, and I was just in a really transitional time in my life, and knew that painting this mural would liberate me in some way,” Ashanti said. 

“Art is healing,” Ashanti said, reflecting on her mural and the process of creation. “We all come from different walks of life and have a different story to tell. We all see through a different lens, and being able to express that and have other people resonate with that is so profound.”