Born in Chicago in 1971 Anthony Lewellen is a multidisciplinary art maker working in various mediums, including drawing, painting, printmaking, installation and more recently animation, video and projection mapping. In his formative years he was an innovative figure within Chicago’s graffiti culture and made a name for himself in the Midwest and beyond hallmarked by street work that featured a simple, bold palette and emotionally complex characters born out of direct observation and digestion of life in the city. Lewellen’s work is always building upon a highly personalized visual vocabulary that continues to evolve and grow. The elements of this enigmatic pictorial language are quintessentially Midwestern and even more precisely quintessentially Chicago.These elements consistently appear in his work regardless of the medium and seem to evoke unspoken narratives written in the urban landscape like images torn from a book. Lewellen has also worked commercially as an illustrator, designer and art director for more than a decade and appropriates traditional commercial art techniques into his work. He is now is solely focused on a personal studio practice and continues to live and work on
the city’s north side.