Chicago (un)Common is a two-panel piece created in collaboration between myself (Artists in Public Schools resident artist Kimmy Noonen) and the Art & Mural Club of Steinmetz College Prep, a public high school in the Belmont Cragin neighborhood of Chicago. I spent the 2025/2026 school year working with Steinmetz’s Sustainable Community Schools program, especially Art Club director Luis Guzman, to inspire the students to explore non-traditional art mediums through process and discovery. 

While working with disposable plastics that are traditionally unrecyclable, a material filling up the world these teenagers will inherit, we learned about the history of their neighborhood as a home to immigrant communities from around the world since the late 1800s. One especially impactful discovery centered around The Brickyard shopping center, a popular destination for the students located a few blocks from the school. Once the site of The Carey Brick Company, 300 million “Chicago Common” bricks were created every year for over 50 years, a material that literally built the city we live in today. But if you walk along the streets of Chicago, it will take work to find these iconic wonders because they are relegated to the sides and backs of most buildings, leaving the faces for more expensive, imported bricks. 

This architectural story felt like an apt, if not infuriating, metaphor for our group. The people of Belmont Cragin are so much like these multi-colored bricks: individually unique, strong, resilient, and rarely getting credit for the essential role they play in building this city. With this idea in mind, we transformed discarded, unwanted, colorful plastic trash into a conversation about value, visibility, identity, and what it means to be common.