As the season for the Austin Town Hall farmers market kicks off June 12, come next year, visitors will be able to admire an artistic bust of Ray Charles Easley at the park’s east entrance. Easley, who passed in 2013, was a respected community leader in Austin who, most prominently, served as the first vice president of the Chicago Westside Branch NAACP and chaired the branch’s labor and industry committee.
To honor Easley’s likeness, sculptors Sonja Henderson and John P. Weber helped organize two community workshops last month, where 20-some relatives and friends of Easley gathered to collage photos they had taken with him and recollect stories of how he touched their lives.
Some of those images and narratives will wrap around the base of a three-foot-tall bust of Easley, depicted through low-relief vignettes.
“The stories have been very interesting. How we translate them into low relief, that’s quite a challenge. We can’t translate all of them, but we hope to evoke the flavor of his many-sided involvements and commitments to the community,” Weber said. “The only difficulty that we have with this project is that we didn’t get to know Ray Charles Easley personally. But so many people spoke about him in detail and in very warm terms that it became very clear that he had played a special role in this community.”
Henderson and Weber, who are both based out of Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood, have already made sketches and clay renderings of the sculpture. Next, they will watch recordings of the two workshops to define the sculpture’s narrative imagery and didactic on the memorial “so people have a better range of what he did and who he was 25, 50, 75 years from now, rather than just a head,” Henderson said.
The artists will then run the design by the Chicago Park District Enhancements and Artwork Committee, which approves proposals for new park features and art. After the design is sent to a foundryman, they hope the sculpture to honor Easley will be installed next summer.
“We were very specific not to do a suited man with a briefcase because that is not how he was recognized and that’s not how people know him. They know him as somebody who was smiling and attentive, very caring, warm and genuine,” Henderson said of Easley. “For public art, portraiture, monumental and memorial work that is going into the public, you have to make the figure recognizable to almost everybody. And everybody has a different view of who this person was, depending upon how and when they met him.”
Who was Ray Charles Easley?
Easley, who was 55 when he died, lived on Chicago’s West Side all his life. After studying history at Northern Illinois University, Easley later served as the Village of Maywood’s human resources director, and worked with the Northwest Austin Council, Westside Health Authority and Westside Ministers’ Coalition.
Easley consistently helped West Side residents by facilitating job opportunities and teaching workplace and computer skills, according to a previous Austin Weekly News interview with his wife, Patricia. She said he started a landscaping business to help people find work.
“Ray was really passionate about the whole notion of job-readiness for all people.” She said that, at his funeral, “people came up and said, ‘Ray helped me get this job. He did my resume for me. He taught me how to tie a tie.’”
“He was just a person who was there for everybody, a person dedicated to helping people,” Vera Davis, the Westside Branch NAACP’s former president, previously told Austin Weekly News. “He really went out of his way to make sure the people on the West Side knew where the jobs were.”
Henderson and Weber have heard the same things about Easley over a decade after his death.
“As we researched his work with youth mentoring, so many stories have come out about him placing people in jobs and making sure that they were successful – meaning that they had longevity at those jobs and support,” Henderson said. “We love who Ray Charles Eastley was as a person, as a conduit in the neighborhood, as a fellow neighbor and, as John [Weber] would say, ‘very much a man of the people.’”
“He fit a lot of varied activities into a life that was cut short,” Weber said. “He was, for a lot of people, an oversized presence and personality and, at the same time, evoked the variety of his engagement with people, with youth, with his contemporaries.”
This isn’t the first time that Henderson and Weber – who founded the Chicago Public Art Group, which aims to engage with communities and share their stories through art – are working together. They designed the Martin Luther King, Jr. Living Memorial in Marquette Park, which was dedicated in 2016 on the fiftieth anniversary of King’s march through the southwest side green space. Henderson said she consulted Weber on her design for the Mamie Till-Mobley and Emmett Till Memorial in 2023 in southwest suburban Summit. Now, the two are putting together a memorial for Easley.
Easley’s family has been fundraising for the construction of the memorial for about a decade, Henderson said. After the raised money saw a matching grant, last April, Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, Ald. Chris Taliaferro’s office and the Chicago Park District collaborated to invite professional artists to apply for the $150,000 commission. The installation is funded by the ward’s discretionary capital funds.
While the workshops for the Easley memorial resulted in the showing of several photographs, many were personal photos of Easley and his family. So, the artists are still asking for anyone with pictures of Easley playing sports or meeting with local leaders to submit them, adding to the community and civic engagement portion of the low-relief images around the monument’s base.
Henderson and Weber are hoping to put the workshop attendees’ collages and stories into a book to give to the Easley family, and maybe even go on exhibit somewhere.
“All of the work that we do and that DCASE does through these grants should be archived in some way and also turned over to . . . the local libraries and town halls as archival historic pieces,” Henderson said.
If you have an image of Ray Charles Easley, reach out to publicart@cityofchicago.org.