My dad found old lockers in our family building. We turned them into the neighborhood's art gallery, food pantry, and tiny fairyland.
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It started with a locker nobody wanted
My family has owned a building in Avondale for over 20 years. This neighborhood is ours in the most literal sense. So when a tenant moved out and left behind a set of old school lockers, we did not just haul them to the curb. We stared at them for a while and started thinking.
My dad is an artist. He makes moving optical illusion pieces, including the rotating metal circle that now sits on top of the first locker. When the two of us started talking about what these old lockers could become, the idea came quickly: a little free library, but for art. Leave art, take art, connect with your neighbors, support local makers. Simple as that.
We installed the first Chicago Art Locker at the corner of Roscoe and Kildare over Memorial Day weekend. Six cubbies, each painted a different color, stocked with rotating work from local artists. Earrings. Handmade cups. Paintings. Stickers. Mini terrariums. Woven pieces. Free art supplies for anyone who needed them. And tucked into the bottom cubby, a tiny fairyland that kids in the neighborhood began checking on like it was their own personal secret.
I did not know how people would respond. I just knew the neighborhood deserved it.
What happened next
Artists started showing up from outside the city. People were driving from the suburbs and Indiana to leave contributions. Kids were making the locker a stop on their daily walk. Neighbors I had never spoken to were stopping me on the street. Block Club Chicago came to write about it. WGN came to do a piece.
The locker manufacturer saw the coverage and donated ten more lockers!
None of that was the plan. The plan was just to put something beautiful on a street corner and see what happened.
But the thing about building something rooted in your community is that the community will show you what it actually needs. And in 2025, what Avondale needed was more than art.
When fear arrived, we responded
As the political climate became harder and scarier, the locker grew with it. I added bilingual Know Your Rights pamphlets. Whistles neighbors could use to alert each other to ICE activity. Motivational stickers. The locker had started as a place of whimsy and it became something more honest: a reminder that art is a form of protest, and that a street corner can hold both beauty and resistance at the same time.
Then the SNAP cuts came.
A second locker. This one full of food.
When federal food assistance cuts started hitting our neighbors, I added a second locker. Same corner. Same concept. This one stocked not with art but with food. Canned goods, shelf-stable staples, whatever neighbors could spare and others could use.
Stocked by neighbors. Shared by strangers.
That phrase captures everything I believe about community. You do not need a nonprofit infrastructure or a city contract to take care of the people around you. You need a corner, a locker, and neighbors willing to show up for each other. That is it.
I did not set out to run a community resource hub. I set out to put art in my neighborhood. But when you pay attention to what people actually need and you have the ability to respond, you respond. That is what the Art Locker has always been about. Paying attention and responding.
Why I really did this
I want to be honest about something, because I think it matters.
I am a designer and a maker living in a city of three million people, and for a long time I felt like I did not quite know where I fit in the creative community here. Chicago has an incredible arts scene. It is also a city where it is genuinely hard to be seen if you are not already plugged into the right circles. I wanted to find my people. I wanted to connect with other artists. And I wanted to create a space where artists at every level, beginners, hobbyists, people who have never shown their work publicly before, could be seen without having to earn it first.
The Art Locker was my answer to that.
It worked. I have met more like-minded people through this project than through almost anything else I have done in Chicago. Artists reach out to contribute. Neighbors stop to talk. People who had never considered themselves part of a creative community started leaving things in the locker and feeling, maybe for the first time, like they were part of something.
That is what I was after. And that is what I got.
What is next
The second locker is now live in Logan Square, painted in yellow dots inspired by Yayoi Kusama, one of my favorite artists. More locations are actively in the works across Chicago, and I applied for a city grant through the Neighborhood Access Program to fund ten more.
What started as a community art project became something I did not fully anticipate. It became a food resource during a hard political moment. It became a protest space. It became a meeting place for artists who needed to feel found. It became a reason for kids to have a favorite corner.
I did not plan any of that. I just put a locker on a street corner, stocked it with things I believed in, and let the neighborhood tell me what it needed.
Chicago keeps telling me. I keep listening.
