“We are artists,” Alec Ozawa says, “but we don’t create art for ourselves.”
He and his fiancée, Ash Stewack, make art for others: for businesses, passersby, and neighborhoods. And most of the time, you won’t even find their signature at the bottom right of the piece.
The Chicago-based sign painters at Fire Signs design, plan, and hand paint pieces across the city. Founded in 2018, their small business runs out of their at-home basement studio. It all bloomed from Stewack seeing the Sign Painters documentary in college and Ozawa’s love for painting motorcycles. The flames were fanned.
Stewack apprenticed for two years before co-founding Fire Signs, named for the Aries-Leo astrological couple. Ozawa and Stewack paint windows, murals, logos, menus—each brushstroke done by hand.
“The physicality and tangibility of sign painting definitely offers more of a human centeredness of art,” Stewack says.
In a digital age with things accessible on-demand, Ozawa adds, “People really like crafted, human made things that have a quality to it that you don’t get with mass production.”
And each design is completely tailored to their clients. “We’re really a part of their story,” he says.
A Long-Lasting Craft
Hand-painted signs have been central advertising mediums throughout Midwest and world history. Scattered across the region, you can still see “ghost signs”—paintings of pre-billboard past, often peeling and faded.
Sharp Signs owner Kelsi Sharp says sign painting is placemaking. Hand-creating signs and murals (old and new) defines neighborhood character and community. That’s essential for “people who are craving agency in their neighborhood (as residents, renters, and homeowners) and who want to define the character of their specific district,” the Minneapolis artist says.
Sharp argues sign painting isn’t necessarily having a comeback. But it is more visible with the exposure help of social media.
“People were doing this for a job long before reels on Instagram and TikTok posts, and they’ll be doing it long after into the next thing,” Sharp says, noting her place in it all. “I’m helping to define the character. I’m helping to perpetuate this craft . . . It’s so much bigger than me. Some signs that I paint, I hope, will outlive me.”
To her, hand painting is personal to clients and communities—so much so that she considers each piece like a birth.
“I’m really like, “OK, I’m going to bring this thing into the world. I’m going to do it with so much care. We do have a deadline that is approaching, usually less than nine months away,” Sharp says. “I’m a doula birthing these signs into the world.”