Jason Brooks was coughing up blood. He couldn’t stop vomiting.
Within hours, the first of several Brooks Golden memorial murals went up. The collaboration between Clam Nation, DIRT, Lucx, Nice One, and Nudnik on Milwaukee Avenue in Bucktown featured Brooks’s tag, 7ist, which continues to haunt walls and newspaper boxes all over town.
Now there’s talk of a book, and in early August, THOR, along with muralist Jeff Zimmerman and others, plans to paint a memorial along the 16th Street viaduct in Pilsen, not far from the giant owl by Brooks that’s become an icon of the 25th Ward’s Art in Public Places initiative. The piece is a small step toward cementing the legacy of an artist who worked largely in an ephemeral discipline.
