Chicago murals: Puerto Rico native Josué Pellot brings his art to Hermosa, Humboldt Park
After Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017, Josué Pellot remembers waiting months to reach his relatives on the phone from his home in Portage Park.
The Category 4 storm knocked out power, flattened houses and killed thousands of people.
When he finally spoke with his aunt, Pellot says, she told him how the kids were outside playing because there was no television, riding their Heelys shoes up and down the hills. Neighbors were cooking and eating communal meals.
“As horrible as the storm was, there’s something really beautiful in that moment,” Pellot says. “When I hear what they’re doing, I’m just amazed.”
That feeling gave rise to the text in his mural at the Segundo Ruiz Belvis Cultural Center in Hermosa: “Este momento hermoso es nuestro,” which he painted in 2021 during the pandemic. The block capital letters rise three stories, white on a black background. Pellot says he has adopted the phrase as a kind of mantra for how he wants to live.
In English, the phrase translates to “This beautiful moment is ours,” which Pellot also painted on West Belmont Avenue in an underpass near North Kedzie Avenue in Avondale. The text is white lowercase letters against a blue sky. Around the holidays, Pellot draws Christmas lights on the mural, stringing them from letter to letter. He covers them up with white paint in the new year.
Someone has added a handful of Peanuts characters to the mural. Pellot doesn’t know who, but says he doesn’t mind.
Pellot started as a graffiti and street artist, and his text murals remain part of his work.
"My first exposure to art was graffiti — text-based, direct and in the street. That never left me. It’s not just about what’s said — it’s about where and how it lands," Pellot says.
A native of Puerto Rico, Pellot moved to Chicago with his family when he was 6. He got his bachelor's degree in fine arts from University of Illinois Chicago and his master's in art theory and practice from Northwestern University. He lives in Portage Park while his studio, Division St. Projects, is on Division Street in the heart of Humboldt Park. He recently moved in, and some of his work remains in boxes, waiting to be unpacked.
“I came from the island to Humboldt,” Pellot says. “I’m in love with the nuance of the neighborhood.”
Pellot's other murals include one on Armitage Avenue in Hermosa that reads: “Gentrification is around the corner.” It’s still there, but often gets tagged, he says.
A Wicker Park mural that read ”Whiteness is the absence of color” in white text on a bright pink background was painted over after neighbors complained and asked for it to be removed, he says. The mural was intended to be a compilation — he painted the text, and another artist planned to contribute next. The piece never got to that point. Pellot says he was told complaints came in soon after the mural went up, but he never heard them directly.
"The statement's intention is to highlight the problematic idea that whiteness is often seen as a neutral or default state," Pellot says. "In color theory, white isn’t the absence of color — it’s the combination of all colors. That contradiction is the point. The work questions the idea of whiteness as a default or pure state, and how that assumption defines everything else as 'other.'"
About the Segundo Ruiz Belvis Cultural Center mural, the organization's executive director, Omar Torres-Kortright, says the message “was very powerful for many reasons,” not least because of the play on the word “hermoso” in the neighborhood Hermosa.
“Josué is the pride and joy of the P.R. community here,” Torres-Kortright says. “To us, it’s a huge honor that he’s so dedicated to our community of artists and our youth programs.”