For years, Hyde Park artist Chris Devins rode his bike past the boarded-up church on Blackstone Avenue — a hulking limestone relic that has sat vacant for more than two decades.

His commissions usually involve requests to “solve ugly walls,” but this time, Devins wanted to beautify an already aesthetically pleasing surface.

Using wheat paste, Devins plastered a reproduction of Paolo Veronese’s “Jupiter Expelling the Vices” across the wings of the church’s facade. It’s the first installment of a new guerrilla art series he calls “Churches.”

Devins and a few helpers installed the twin murals in late September without the explicit permission of the building’s owner.

“It’s street art,” Devins said. “No rules, no commissions, no committees, no permission.”

The painting depicts the Roman god Jupiter attacking five mythological vices with his thunderbolts. Devins said the 16th-century work resonated with him on a personal level.

“As an artist, I might have a vice or two,” he said, looking up at Veronese’s muscular depictions of Pride, Lust, Idolatry, Avarice and Heresy.

The project marks a departure from Devins’ previous work, which has focused on celebrating local figures and community identity. His 2023 Bronzeville Legends project — which won a Landmarks Illinois Preservation Award — featured massive photo-realistic portraits of Black cultural icons like musicians Nat King Cole and Louis Armstrong and playwright Lorraine Hansberry. His Hyde Park Heroes series spotlighted everyday neighborhood residents, including First Aid Comics owner James Nurss.

His work has also drawn controversy. In 2017, Devins faced criticism for appropriating an image of Michelle Obama as an Egyptian queen for a South Shore mural without crediting the original painter.

Yet Devins insists the new murals, whose source material has no copyright restrictions, are also grounded in his sense of the neighborhood’s ethos.

“While these don’t look linked, like, they’re not pictures of famous residents from the area, there’s a link in terms of Hyde Park’s intellectual, academic, high-culture aesthetic that is appropriate,” he said.

“Churches” also represents what Devins described as a return to the religious iconography of his youth.

“From first grade through eighth grade, I was sitting in these beautiful churches with these incredible paintings, altars and statues,” Devins said. “For eight years of my formative life, I was surrounded by this style of painting.”

The installation on the shuttered church, 5640 S. Blackstone Ave., also reflects Devins’ philosophy of bringing fine art to public spaces outside traditional gallery settings.

“I’m putting it out there for everybody to see, for those people who might not have the time or feel comfortable going into galleries which are purposely designed to a degree to keep certain people out,” he said.

Devins, who holds a master's degree in urban planning from the University of Illinois Chicago, said his work draws on “tactical urbanism” — small, low-cost interventions that can quickly improve neighborhoods.

“Usually with urban planning, it takes $100 million to do a project … I'll be retired, or 75 years old by the time it gets done," he said. “Tactical urbanism is finding small-scale, inexpensive interventions that you can do yourself, quickly, right now, that make a difference.”

The shuttered building, Saint Stephen’s Church, was built in 1917 as the Tenth Church of Christ, Scientist. It has been mired in development disputes since developer Konstantinos “Gus” Antoniou purchased it in 1997. A 2000 zoning law prevented construction of his plan to turn it into condominiums, and subsequent designs have been blocked by neighboring property owners. The building has accumulated broken windows and graffiti over the years, with urban explorers documenting its abandoned interior.

Installing the work on the church proved technically challenging. Devins said the wall was “crumbling” during installation. An initial attempt one year ago failed when the wheat paste didn’t adhere properly to the unstable surface. The current installation, completed two weeks ago, took Devins and his crew about 12 to 14 hours to complete.

Devins’ wheat paste method uses restored high-resolution images printed large, and applied with a mix of paper, wheat and water — essentially “papier-mâché on buildings,” he said. The finished work is coated to withstand weather for years. In his North Kenwood studio, he refines the largely proprietary process, which he says shares similarities with film photography. “My competitors are on me,” he added.

His path to public art began in the late 1980s as a teenage skateboarder doing graffiti tags around Chicago. He stopped after feeling it was “a little irresponsible.” 

His interest reignited around 1993 when he met William Upski Wimsatt, a Hyde Park resident whose mother lived in Devins’ mother’s apartment complex. Wimsatt's book, “Bomb the Suburbs,” presented street art through an academic lens, linking hip-hop culture, graffiti and urban intervention. 

“He excited me intellectually,” Devins said. “That’s when I started returning to it and going, ‘Oh, wow, this is cool.’ It gave me some definition for what I was doing.” 

He later studied at Roosevelt University under professor Jeffrey Edwards, who introduced him to urban planning concepts about social spaces and the democratization of public areas. After earning his master's in urban planning 13 years ago, Devins said he “realized I have something.” 

“I have a relation to the streets already,” he recalled thinking. “I can use what I know and have been playing around with for years in street art and get serious with it.”

Devins said the project addresses what he calls “community greening,” referencing the broken windows theory that suggests maintaining and improving physical spaces can shape positive neighborhood behaviors.

“Studies have shown that if you go into blighted areas, if you make things look nice in the community, it kind of shapes people’s behaviors to be nice,” he said.

The muralist plans to expand the series to other abandoned churches across Chicago. He has identified a church at 59th and State streets where he intends to install a piece inspired by “The Raft of the Medusa,” a 19th-century painting by Théodore Géricault, as well as at additional locations in Pilsen and on the North Side.

“I’m making an inventory of them,” Devins said. “I’m going to do as many of these churches as I can.”

The project also addresses broader questions about the fate of shuttered religious buildings as attendance declines both nationwide and locally.

“That's a whole ‘nother question — what to do with all these beautiful buildings as society drifts away from traditional forms of religion?” Devins said.

He hopes the visibility of his guerrilla installations will attract funding from foundations and city departments to formalize and expand his community greening efforts, though he prefers to work directly with funders rather than through intermediary nonprofits.

“I hope that foundations, organizations will see these tactical urban art interventions in the community, see the quality and start to make it simpler for me to get some funding to go around and do some community greening across the city,” he said.