The Ice Cream Truck Cometh
Zimmerman, who’s 30, graduated with a graphic arts degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1992. After college, he joined the Jesuit Volunteer Corps and for the next three years was a social worker dealing with street kids in Tacna, Peru, a shantytown. Back in the U.S. and wanting to be an artist, he moved to Chicago, took painting classes at Columbia College, and taught continuing education courses at the School of the Art Institute. The latter connection led, in 1996, to a teaching job at Casa Juan Diego, a Pilsen youth center run by Saint Pius V parish. Working with the teens there, Zimmerman painted his first outdoor mural, Educacion: See y Know, on the wall of the center.
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So last spring Zimmerman began “stalking” ice cream trucks, getting deeper and deeper into the world of mobile ice cream vending. For four months he took photographs of trucks and pushcarts in his Bucktown neighborhood and in Pilsen, where, he says, vendors were more numerous.
“I’d be looking for unique wrappers I didn’t have,” Zimmerman says. “Just like the kids, I’m buying it for the cool package, not knowing what’s inside of them.” He painted images of vendors, trucks, and kids on the wrappers. He also did a series of works on Masonite panels using ice cream bars as a medium–and was surprised to discover that after the stuff melted it left a goopy, oily residue that would never quite dry.
