The images in the Berwyn mural are vintage sci-fi — from alien spaceships and a shrieking woman horrified by something in the sky to characters from old “Planet of the Apes” movies.
But what is that oddly shaped brown object, surrounded by a yellow-and-green fluorescent glow, that seems to be firing a laser beam?
“That’s a giant chicken wing,” says Daryl Harris, who painted the mural outside the Cigars & Stripes BBQ Lounge at 6715 Ogden Ave. in the near west suburb.
Harris says the chicken is there because the chicken on the menu at the restaurant, whose owner commissioned him to do the artwork in 2022, is very good.
Poultry aside, Harris, who lives in Schaumburg, says the mural is an homage to movies and TV shows about aliens and monsters. He loves the old-school horror and outer-space genres.
So does Cigars & Stripes owner Ronnie Lottz.
The establishment often plays those kinds of movies for customers, including showing “The Exorcist” every Halloween with a pea soup special on the menu.
Lottz says he also hosts “an evening here once a month called ‘Monster Movie Meatball Night’ the last Tuesday of every month. I put 500 meatballs in the smoker.”
He and Harris have been friends for a while, and 10 years or so ago Lottz asked Harris to rework a life-sized model of a mummy that had been a fixture in the bar but was deteriorating.
Harris obliged. Then, he moved away, and the friends lost touch for a while.
Meantime, somebody made off with the mummy.
When Harris came back to the bar a year and a half ago, Lottz had just found the stolen mummy displayed outside a Halloween-themed store and brought it back.
Lottz suggested that Harris paint a mural, with aliens, on the outside of the building, which sits along historic Route 66, whose emblem also can be seen in the painting that spans 55 feet across and stands 25 feet tall.
“He’s just an amazing artist on all facets, sculpture and everything,” Lottz says of Harris, who used to teach art at Harper College in Palatine and at a Milwaukee high school and now is a tattoo artist. “It’s like fate had him do the wall.”
He says he hopes to have Harris make an addition to the mural — a likeness of Chicago horror film host Svengoolie.
