Most people participate in culture, but pioneers create it. Since seizing her creative calling, Chicago-based artist Jenny Vyas has repeatedly confronted the unknown, that liminal space between light and dark, hunting new insights to infuse into her artwork. Vyas’s output spans three mediums—fine art canvases blending monochromatic figures with abstract expressionism, philosophical prose called her heARTwork writings, and spectacular murals promoting her mission to the masses. Most importantly, Vyas lives the bravery espoused across her creations. The original intention of what we call a “personal brand” is integrity.
Vyas left her corporate career in e-commerce in 2013 while healing from a dark period in her romantic life. Deep-seated revelations from this difficult era uprooted her monotony and irrevocably called her to become an artist. Art has certainly served as an avenue for catharsis and self-exploration since, but Vyas considers this gift her duty to share with others. “It’s my mantra,” she told me one afternoon over video chat. “I am a conduit for something bigger than me.”
The “accidental muralist” took a whole year after leaving the corporate world to hone her craft in complete privacy. Then she set about a careful strategy tailored to her own abilities and aims. Vyas started painting live several times a month at charity events, immersing herself in Chicago’s creative and professional community. After gaining momentum, Vyas was invited to paint a mural at The Violet Hour—one of the city’s truly clandestine speakeasies, marked only by one mural painted by a different artist each month on the bar’s wooden front façade.
Vyas felt apprehensive about the opportunity. Sure, she’d painted some Disney characters in the gym of a daycare where she’d worked during college, but she’d never tried professional muralism. Although she’d always admired public artists for their ability to be “skinless and public” with their practice, she’d never imagined confronting the feat for herself. “To take that first step, to put your work out there and put yourself out there on that stage, on that scale, is terrifying,” Vyas remarked. “I never thought I would be part of that community and that culture.”
“I still feel like an outsider, because I didn’t start off in that arena,” she continued. “Most graffiti and street artists that I know really did this for their whole lives; it is almost a religion to them.”
What’s more, Vyas is a female-identifying figure in a harrowingly male-dominated art form. “I did not expect gender inequity when I became an artist, so that was a shock for me,” she said. Despite graffiti and street art’s revolutionary undertones, the medium has massive leaps to make in bridging its gender disparity, perhaps the result of its association with intense manual labor and illegal undertones. She’s grateful to help balance the ratio one mural at a time.
West Loop restaurant Federales Chi invited Vyas to create a pair of wings inspired by Kelsey Montague’s once-iconic and now ubiquitous concept. The restaurant wanted her distinct style (then centered around tight figurative painting) paired with graffiti elements. Vyas invited local artist Czr Prz to collaborate with her, pairing his urban edge with her fierce femininity.
“We knew it was going to put us on the map as artists,” Vyas recalled. It did. What they did not expect, however, was the heartfelt depth of the viewer interactions that ensued. Vyas recounted her favorite message they received from the outpouring of participation. “One was from a guy who was overweight and suicidal,” she said. “He took a picture against the wings and made a pact with himself to lose the weight within a year. A year later, he celebrated the loss of that weight by taking a shirtless photo of himself against those wings and sharing that this pact saved his life.”
Her work honors precisely this type of grit. Hers are the tumultuous moments before the celebrated insight, the trenches where growth actually occurs. Vyas’s practice has grown beyond its initial focus on figurative painting drafted painstakingly between Procreate, Photoshop, and hand sketches to distill a singular emotion into a singular artwork. Today, her creations marry this hyper-controlled style with the free-flowing, subconscious release of abstraction—a collision of tones that speaks to the harmony of force and surrender behind those truly difficult moments most people don’t normally talk about.
Though Vyas still feels like the new kid on the block, her peers in the street art scene have warmed up. Maybe that’s because Vyas shares her talents willingly with this hyper-competitive industry. She coaches artists on building their brand whenever she’s approached for help. She’s done digital marketing and offered social media guidance as a gift to other artists. “I think I might have been welcomed a bit better in this creative community because I was willing to keep my heart and my doors open,” she said. “I’m willing to learn and share my knowledge freely.”
Her nature is more a matter of principle than strategy. Vyas is determined to create the world she wants to see by liberating other artists from the starving artist trope. “This relationship with money that artists traditionally have is so dangerous,” Vyas explained. “In Indian culture—which is my ethnicity—money is a form of God. We don’t look at money as a necessary evil. The more you take care of it, the more it grows, and the better life you have.” Caring about one’s professional life doesn’t mean selling out—it means self-care, not only in ensuring that material needs are met, but also in the psychological support of taking oneself seriously.
Street art is a medium forever in flux, though often hung up on the past. Shifting one’s gaze towards the future requires the mental agility and willingness to imagine what that future might look like. Eventually the corporate mural festival bubble will pop, and artists might look around, trying to pick up the pieces. Authenticity is all there is—what’s created from the spit and elbow grease of one’s own life won’t fall victim to a fair-weather market.
Vyas maintains her authenticity through several pointed strategies. First, she says “no” to a lot of opportunities that cross her path but don’t align with her objectives as an artist. Next, she’s committed to sharing her actual self across social media, “so when people meet you, there isn’t a shell shock.” Lastly, publishing her heARTwork writings keeps Vyas in constant contact with a genuine vulnerability that resonates with her audience. “When I started sharing my personal existential and philosophical musings publicly, people really started connecting with me. We’re all struggling through some trauma, and unpacking some of my learnings made me accessible as a human, not just as an artist,” she said.
You can find murals by Jenny Vyas across the country in Boston, New Jersey, New York, and Ohio, alongside works throughout her hometown in Chicago. You can find them prolifically in the future as well, as this bright artist’s unconventional approach takes her to the forefront of street art’s rising next generation. After all, creating culture requires a deep dive into the unknown, the bravery to confront that murky place between starting and finishing, pain and pleasure, right and wrong. Survival is a matter of integrity.
When Vyas isn’t painting, you can find her wandering in the mountains where she grounds herself in solitude.
