Evanston Killed Its Graffiti Walls Twenty Years Ago. Four Artists Who Grew Up on Them Want One Back.

July 5, 2026

Evanston, Illinois hasn't had a wall where graffiti was legal in twenty years. Every permission wall the suburb ever had is gone. Now four artists who learned to paint on those vanished walls are asking the city for one back, and city hall is listening.

the old embankment retaining wall on Green Bay Road in Evanston between Foster and Simpson streets. Image: live.staticflickr.com.

The walls that used to be legal

Permission walls used to exist all over Evanston. Writers could paint the back of Prairie Moon. They could paint a wall at the now-closed Dave's Kitchen. No permit, no fine, no cop pulling up while you're mid-piece. Over the last two decades, both walls disappeared, one building at a time, and nothing replaced them, according to Evanston RoundTable. Writers who wanted a legal wall had nowhere to go. Everything after that got done in the dark or not at all.

A Daily Northwestern report from March laid out the same problem from another angle. Evanston's murals are fading, crumbling, getting painted over, and the city has no consistent plan for replacing them. Legal wall space in Evanston, whether it's a commissioned mural or a spot to freestyle, has been shrinking for years.

Four artists, one wall each side

The fix on the table now is a stretch of embankment wall on Green Bay Road, between Foster and Simpson streets. It has two faces and two different plans. The side facing Green Bay Road belongs to the city. Four Evanston artists, Garrett Munski, Ole Flores, Alex Mendoza and Jordan Nickel, want to paint that side as a single, planned, professional mural. All four came up using permission walls before Evanston's disappeared, and they've said this is their way of giving something back to a scene that shaped them, per Evanston RoundTable.

Evanston 5th Ward Councilmember Bobby Burns. Image: i.ytimg.com.

The other face of the wall, owned by a party identified as Cleary, is the actual permission wall. That side would be open to anyone. Paint over your own work, paint over someone else's, no commission and no single artist's name on it. That's the part that actually replaces what Prairie Moon and Dave's Kitchen used to offer.

A councilmember and a nonprofit did the legwork

This didn't come out of nowhere. Fifth Ward Councilmember Bobby Burns first pitched the idea to the Evanston Arts Council more than a year before the April 2026 meeting. He brought Dustin Harris and Lea Pinsky from the nonprofit Art Encounter to gauge interest back in January 2025. Art Encounter is funding the whole project itself. It isn't asking the Arts Council for a dime, according to Evanston RoundTable. That matters in a budget cycle where most public art asks come with a price tag attached.

a colorful legal graffiti permission wall covered in spray-painted characters. Image: get.pxhere.com.

The politics of a quorum

At the April 21 meeting, the Arts Council didn't have enough members present for a formal vote. Nobody blocked it either. The members who showed up backed the idea informally, which in city government usually means yes, just not yet on paper. A binding vote still has to happen before anyone puts a spray can to that wall.

Why permission walls matter

A permission wall isn't a mural. A mural gets designed, approved, and locked in place, usually for years. A permission wall is a living surface. Someone paints it Tuesday, someone else paints over it Thursday. It's how writers get reps without a police record attached. It's also, historically, how cities keep tags off buildings that actually matter to them. Give writers one legal wall and the illegal ones tend to get hit less. Evanston had that deal for years with Prairie Moon and Dave's Kitchen. Then it didn't.

What happens in July

If the Arts Council formalizes its support, Munski, Flores, Mendoza and Nickel plan to paint the Green Bay Road mural in July or August 2026. Prep work on the Cleary-owned back wall, the actual permission wall, would happen around the same window. Nothing is finished. No date is locked. But for the first time in twenty years, Evanston has a real plan to put a legal wall back in the hands of the people who use walls like this the most.