Roll into Rogers Park’s Howard Street L station and you can’t miss it from the train platform: a massive, five-story mural with bluish leaves that resemble tongues, sort of, and giant orange orbs of fruit.
The best place to see the mural is alongside the tracks, where deboarding passengers can appreciate the full back wall of 1615 W. Howard St., which looks like it was swallowed by a rapacious citrus tree. Take time to look closer, and the blue-green leaves and red-orange globes are pixelated with shades of color.
There aren’t many spots to take in the entirety of the mural, as it backs a maze-like parking lot, the train tracks and a few smaller buildings. In fact, it’s not obvious from the platform which Howard Street building it belongs to. But if you do meander through the alleys and parked cars, you’ll see that the mural depicts one of Sick Fisher’s trademark storefront designs on the bottom left corner. The storefront is painted in a grid design with Fisher’s typical hatches throughout.
The mural was one of his first, completed in 2015. The storefront was added last year, after the mural was tagged for the first time.
Sick Fisher is Nick Fisher, the Humboldt Park artist and Florida native who now lives full-time in Chicago.
For Big Fruit, “at that time, the phrase ‘bite off more than you can chew,’ that was very much what this mural was to me,” Fisher says. “I’d done bigger things, public things, but nothing on that scale. It was a big learning process. It was very exciting.”
The building at the time housed a coffee shop called Sol Cafe, and Fisher was friends with Simone Freeman, one of the shop’s founders, he says. She kept pushing for him to paint it and to get more art in the neighborhood. The Rogers Park Business Alliance agreed to commission the mural, and Fisher finally gave in.
“It was 2015. I was just figuring myself out,” he says.
Sol Cafe closed in 2023, but the mural lives on. Rogers Park Taproom and Coffeehouse now operates in that space.
Sandy Price, executive director of the Rogers Park Business Alliance, says, “We wanted something big and bold, and he did it.”
Some asked why the group would commission a mural in a parking lot, Price says. “Well, you can see it from the train. We’re trying to bring attention to the community and Howard Street. Everything that you do to make the community brighter and more interesting and to bring more people around, to activate an area, is good.”
Fisher works full time as an artist now, and murals — his favorite things to paint — make up about half his work. He especially enjoys painting storefronts on storefronts, similar to what he did to cover graffiti on Big Fruit’s lower corner.
Fisher also has a mural visible from the Blue Line’s California stop in Logan Square, where he was commissioned last fall by resident Nick Briz to paint an entire house with Fisher’s own inventive facade.
“His whole thing is the fake facades, turning one element into something else entirely,” Briz says about why he commissioned the project.
Briz is a digital artist and University of Chicago professor who says he appreciates Logan Square for its art scene and for his neighbors’ appreciation of that art scene. He’s happy with the final result.
“I think it’s awesome. It’s super dope the way it came out. It definitely completely transforms the house,” Briz says.
In the past 10 years Fisher has gotten a lot faster at painting, he says, and the house mural was done in about three weeks.
“Big Fruit took me almost a month, stumbling my way through it and getting it just right,” Fisher says. “Now I can move faster and do more in a shorter amount of time. It’s neat to see the difference.”
