Since 2011, Chicago graffiti artist and hip-hop documentarian Flash ABC has overseen Project Logan, a four-sided permission wall that encircles a 3,300-square-foot plot of land between Fullerton and Medill Avenues just west of Milwaukee Avenue. Over the past five years, Flash has helped hundreds of artists showcase their graffiti skills and provided Logan Square with a flood of public artwork. Project Logan’s walls have paid tribute to fallen hip-hop heroes, from Steff Skills’s mural honoring Tribe Called Quest MC Phife Dawg to Dream and Werm One’s recent homage to local underground rapper Mic One. Two of Project Logan’s four walls face the elevated Blue Line train tracks that bisect Logan Square, so commuters and tourists are likely to get a look at the art as they pass by. “I know that 80,000 people see it weekly,” Flash says. “We’ve done a lot there.”
Flash retired from bombing in 1987 and checked out of the scene entirely until 2003, when another graffiti artist invited him to work on a permission wall on 59th and Western in Englewood, with more than 100 other artists. “I’m like, ‘So what happened to my neighborhood, where we started it?,” Flash says. “After that, from 2003 on, I did try working with the community in Logan Square and I got turned down. I heard everything from ‘That art is not done here’ to ‘We don’t do that.’ There were no permission walls in Logan Square.” Flash wanted to recreate the permission wall culture that flourished on the south side in his neighborhood by creating a legal public canvas for artists from all over the city to come and show their work.
