Chicago murals: Painting Beverly makes the neighborhood home for artist Nate Otto

When artist Nate Otto moved to Beverly in 2020 — just before the pandemic closed everything down — he knew it as the neighborhood where his wife grew up.

Now, his murals around the South Side neighborhood have begun to define it as home.

“This is where we plan on raising our kids, and it’s really cool to have murals nearby to visit with our kids as they grow up,” says Otto, who was raised in Deerfield.

So far he’s added four to the neighborhood. Two are on the back side of Two Mile Coffee Bar and visible from the Rock Island line Metra tracks. One is around the corner from Ohana Ice & Treats on South Wood Street at West 103rd Street, and the last one can be found on the awning above Town Realty at 10938 S. Western Ave. Many of his murals feature houses and cityscapes.

Otto finished the awning above Town Realty in April 2025. Business owner Meg Mulrenin says she knew exactly whom she wanted to paint the 50-foot corrugated metal strip once she got the green light from her landlord.

“Immediately, I was like, I want to get Nate Otto to do a huge mural,” she says. “That little house mural that he does that is so constant and so much of his work, it’s perfect for me because I’m a real estate office.”

Like many of Otto's other works, the mural is a mish-mash grid of buildings turned into a patterned cityscape. This edition is black and white, and hidden within are many of the architectural gems of Beverly, the South Side and greater Chicago. Those include Comiskey Park, the Givins Beverly Castle, the former Sears Tower and more.

“It’s like an 'I spy' of notable Chicago architecture that makes it really unique and special,” Mulrenin says.

Otto is largely a studio artist, but says he loves painting murals to get away from the distractions and focus entirely on creating art. He listens to audiobooks while he works, he says, and often will associate a mural with whichever book he listened to while he painted it.

Cityscapes are his trademark, he says, and within that style he can go in many directions. He tries to include landmarks and important places near the mural he's painting. Two of his murals last year were for a private residence and a condo building. Another was on the side of a retired school bus that now serves the nonprofit Hoopbus program based in Venice, Calif., and travels around the nation bringing communities together through basketball.

Otto mainly paints his murals by hand with brushes. In addition to Beverly, his work can be found in Pilsen, Fulton Market and elsewhere around Chicago.

But Beverly is where he plans to call home for a long time.

“It’s a great community to raise kids,” he says. “Sometimes we miss our old life in the more densely populated part of the city, but the tradeoff has been well worth it.”