Mr. Imagination’s Grotto

I first learned of Mr. Imagination (Gregory Warmack), a Chicago outsider artist, at Intuit before we moved to Chicago. Now that we live here I’ve been recognizing his pieces around Chicago including a series of his paintbrush heads at the Uptown library and a bench at the Children’s Museum. When I heard that there was something called Mr. Imagination’s Grotto I definitely wanted to take a look so when we headed to our third architecture tour walk last Fall, which was to historical music sites in Bronzeville, we took a detour to the Elliott Donnelley Youth Center Community Art Garden. The meditation grotto is a concrete structure embedded with found treasures and ancient fossils and was built in 1995 according to RoadsideArchitecture.com. The gates were locked (perhaps because all parks were closed because of the pandemic) so we couldn’t go into the Garden to see the grotto or any of the other artwork but we got a pretty good look at (and photo of) the grotto through the fence.