In May, art
festival organizer Ed Marszewski asked the Chicago painter Gabriel
Villa to paint a mural on a building owned by Marszewski’s mother.
The mural depicted three Chicago police surveillance cameras, one
embossed with a skull, one with a crucifix, and one with a dead
deer. And as Senior Editor Radley Balko notes in the Artifact from
our August-September issue, although the city requires no permit
for murals on private property, Alderman Jim Balcer—responding, he
claimed, to “three or four” citizen complaints—had the city’s
Graffiti Blasters bureau paint over the art without bothering to
consult the property owner.
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