Chris Devins

Chris Devins is an artist/urban planner from Chicago, Illinois who engages in placemaking, which blends Art and Urban Planning. Art + Urban Planning = Creative Placemaking. He is known for his large scale, outdoor image murals that celebrate the Identity of the community he is working in, whether that Identity be real, imagined, past, present or future. His works are interactive, and can most easily be understood by observing how people relate with them on the streets. Always public, the work rejects the compartmentalized way Art is typically detached from its surroundings. His works are a form of tactical urbanism, placing the unsuspecting citizen in a situationist experience that emphasizes playfulness and drifting around urban environments. It takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape. The result: an unplanned journey in which the contours and signals of the surrounding geography unconsciously direct the traveler, creating new experiences. He works in a variety of mediums, from wheat pastes to vinyl tarp and paint. His work explores the intersection of art and urban planning and has been heavily covered by the Chicago media since the end of 2014. His murals often focus on known musical artists like Chance the Rapper and Common. He is the creator of several outdoor Art initiatives in the Chicago area, including [1] Hyde Park Heroes, the Pullman Project (Briscoe 2015 p.A4), Chatham 2.0 (Mwachukwu 2016 p. 1) and most notably, Bronzeville Legends (Cholke 2014 p. 2).