An Interview With Oscar Joyo: Main Street Mural Artist
Oscar Joyo is a Malawian-born, Chicago-based artist whose mural, Love Lana (Lana Love) was recently voted Best Mural in 2025 by Chicago Reader. He’s also the third artist behind Open Studio’s Main Street Mural Project!
In this interview, Oscar shares more about how he got into painting murals and why he’s excited to be a part of the Main Street Mural. Keep reading to get to know him better and stop by Gallery 901 in March to see some of his work in person!
Hi Oscar! Thanks for chatting with us today. Can you start by telling us how you got connected with Open Studio Project to do this mural?
Oscar: I got connected with Open Studio Project through my old high school instructor – Nayme Brown. He referred us to each other and Rob, Hope and I had a really good rapport so we decided to move forward.
When Rob told me that I was going to be working with Xavier and Edwige, it was really cool because Xavier is the brother of my art instructor, Bruna, who I actually had in high school. So, it was kind of like a small world situation. The fact that I get to work with Xavier, it’s like I'm working with with Ms. Win and Mr. Brown again.
Although you’ve become well-known in Chicago for your murals, you’ve got a large body of other work. Can you share more about your creative process? How does the process differ between the smaller personal works that you do and your mural projects?
Oscar Joyo’s collection, Ubuntu, is showing at Gallery 901 through March 31st.
Oscar: The creative process is relatively the same for both – it’s very community driven. A lot of the figures I portray are an amalgamation of paying homage to my African roots while embracing the innovations of the present to create a future that encompasses everyone, one that’s a little more in harmony with various cultures and walks of life.
With the smaller more personal, gallery-driven pieces, I use a mixture of acrylic, aerosol, and lately I’ve been incorporating oil paint to give a little bit more richness to my palette. I use certain mediums to give things a bit more texture and make things a little more of an impasto approach.
With murals, I’m relegated mostly to spray paint for the bulk of it, and then house paint to get some of the shapes and colors. I’ve only been using spray paint since 2022. Before, I would use a mixture of acrylic and house paint and meticulously paint each image. But now I've gotten more comfortable switching back and forth between house paint, acrylic mural paint, and spray paint.
You talk a lot about identity in your art. Could you share a bit more about your background and how it’s shaped your identity?
Oscar: Yeah, I grew up in South Bend. I was born in Malawi and bounced back and forth between Malawi and South Africa for the first seven years of my life, then moved to the United States permanently 26 years ago. I was in South Bend for 10 or 11 years, then moved to Chicago to get my bachelor's in fine arts at the American Academy of Art, and I've been here ever since.
Chicago is what I call home. It’s where I feel like I got my identity and knowledge not only as a creative, but just as a person.
Was there anything specific about Chicago that you feel like helped shape your identity?
Oscar: I think it's one of those Goldilocks situations where the city is not too big. It's not too spread out. Everything is as balanced as it possibly can be. Despite a lot of things in an economic sense – like rent, bills, all this stuff – I feel like the culture really offsets that, which is what I needed.
Since I left South Bend, it's started to diversify a little bit, but Chicago already had that from the jump. There's different types of Africans that I’ve gotten to meet, and people from other different diasporas, and more importantly, they showed me a type of Blackness that was not only loving and accepting, but they were able to educate me and even help me understand my own Blackness in a way that I don't think I've found anywhere else.
Tell us more about the work you're showing at Open Studio and how identity shows up in that collection.
Oscar: The collection that is showing at Open Studios Project is an old, 2023 collection called Ubuntu, which means “I am because of all of you.”
I was pretty much reimagining my upbringing before moving to the United States. After doing that collection, and in doing work after the fact, is when I realized that I'm African, and my Africanness is intertwined with a lot of my Blackness here in the United States. After that, I was able to feel a lot more comfortable incorporating a lot of music I loved – from hip hop to rock to metal to jazz and all sorts of things.
I also got to find commonality amongst cultures and just knowing that we're not that different at all. And what makes it even better is that I get to share that with my friends from different walks of life and we’ll realize like, “Oh, you got this too? You got that too? That's crazy! We have something like that,” and so on and so forth.
It's that cultural exchange that I want to keep developing, and I think that's what made it click, and I realized I definitely belong in Chicago. Chicago has a particular rhythm and frequency that is just, it's just perfect.
Part of Oscar’s collection, Ubuntu, showing at Gallery 901 in March.
When did you start doing murals?
Oscar: Technically 2018 – I did my first two indoor murals, and then in the 2020s I did my first few outdoor murals.
In 2018, I started with Healthy Hood, which is in Pilson. Then in 2020, because of the Black Lives Matter protests, and COVID, there was such a huge need for Black art. So, I was fortunate to kind of be dragged into it for lack of a better word, and ever since then, I just kind of stuck with it and have been developing it since 2020.
How many murals have you done?
Oscar: Officially, about 20. Not all of them are in Chicago. I've done one New York with Dark Matter Coffee. I’ve got two murals in Indiana – one in West Lafayette, one in South Bend. I have a triptych in Champagne and then another one on the way, and then the rest are in the city.
Right now, I’m working on getting some other murals outside the Midwest. As much as I love the murals in the Midwest and Chicago, I also want to see where else I can explore.
Epoch — a mural by Oscar Joyo in Champagne, IL
What is it about murals that is exciting to you?
Oscar: With murals, what I really enjoy is that it's pretty much like a public art gallery that everyone gets to see at any time of the day. There's not a lot of access with regular gallery shows and museums – they always rotate out. But with murals, it's there for a long, long time. The public gets to see it no matter what demographic or social class you are. It's just there, and that's super important.
What are you most looking forward to about the open studio mural in the coming months and like that whole process that's coming together?
Oscar: Like any other mural that I've done, it's another chance to make the place a little bit more colorful. And the fact that this is a collaborative mural – it's great to just do mural, but I feel like a collaboration in this sense is gonna be super exciting because we have three distinct voices and three distinct approaches to explore.
I feel like I get to learn something new, but more importantly, the neighborhood gets something a lot more vivid. Evanston's always been like a Hallmark city. It's really nice and pleasant for me to walk around and do all these really cute activities. I want to help maintain that vivid energy that Evanston’s always had and make it even more colorful. So, that's why I'm really excited to work on this mura and to be involved in it.
Is anything else you're working on right now outside the main street mural that you would be excited for people to know about?
Of course there’s one that’s an NDA so, nothing I can share! I mean, I really want to share this one project, but besides the mural and NDA projects I'm just trying to do some research for future shows.
Well, we’ll be excited to find what the NDA project is when you can say.
Oscar: Oh, absolutely! You probably will learn about it really soon.
You can check out Oscar’s work at Gallery 901 from March 7th-31st.
Then, get in on the action by signing up for our finally community workshop on April 18th!