Walk from the Riverwalk up to Main Street on any given afternoon and you'll pass a bronze woman sitting on a bench outside Barnes & Noble, a hand-painted dog outside a downtown shop, and a fifteen-foot red sculpture near the water. Most people who live here assume it's all one thing, some unified "Naperville art trail" that a committee sketched out years ago and has been quietly filling in ever since.
It isn't. The bench sculpture, the painted dog, and the red sculpture by the river come from three separate organizations that have never coordinated with each other, run on three different funding models, and answer to three different boards. One is a 30-year nonprofit with a founder who just stepped back. One is a business alliance that repurposes a decades-old charity tradition every summer. One is an art league old enough to have earned a mention in the AP wire the year it started. They've been building on top of each other downtown for so long that the seams have mostly disappeared. This weekend, with all three visibly active at once, is a good time to notice them again.
Three Owners, Six Blocks
The permanent backbone of downtown's art is Century Walk, a public art initiative that the nonprofit Century Walk Corporation launched in 1996. It now includes 53 locations, mostly murals, mosaics, and bronze sculptures clustered along about two miles of downtown sidewalk, funded over the years through Illinois Arts Council grants, the city's hotel-motel tax, local banks, and private donors. Century Walk chairman Brand Bobosky has been the public face of the project since it started, soliciting sponsorships and guiding its growth from a handful of history-themed installations into a collection that stretches roughly 7.5 miles from Burlington Square Park on the north side to the 95th Street Library on the south.
Running alongside it, and older by twelve years, is the Naperville Art League. NAL commissioned one of downtown's first standalone sculptures back in 1984, the red steel piece called Landforms, placed near Eagle Street along the Riverwalk. The League also hosts the annual Riverwalk Fine Art Fair, which started with a costumed reenactment of Georges Seurat's famous park painting and drew enough attention that year to make the AP wire. This year's fair, running Saturday and Sunday, is its 41st.
The third program is younger and intentionally temporary. Dog Days of Summer, now run by the Downtown Naperville Alliance, traces back to displays the former Naperville United Way used to put up each summer before auctioning the figures for charity. The Alliance revived the concept in 2012 with holiday-themed sculptures in winter, then moved the program to summer a few years later. This year's lineup includes two dozen hand-painted dog sculptures and one cat, each sponsored by a downtown business and decorated by a different local artist, scattered along Main Street, Water Street, Jefferson Avenue, and the Riverwalk. Public voting for the People's Choice award closed in late August, with winners announced the first week of September.
None of these three groups reports to the others. There's no single map, no shared naming convention, no joint press release when something new goes up. What looks like a coordinated civic art plan is really three separate institutions that happened to converge on the same six blocks.
The Plaques Nobody Stops to Read
Some of the stories behind individual pieces are better than the pieces themselves. The bronze woman on the bench outside Barnes & Noble is Genevieve, a tribute to Naperville journalist and historian Genevieve Towsley, sculpted in bronze and installed as one of Century Walk's early history pieces. A few blocks over, at the Community Concert Center in Central Park, a mural called The Great Concerto shows a crowd at a summer concert. Look closely and you'll find real faces in that crowd. Muralist Bart Gunderson spent 1,600 hours on the piece, and Century Walk raised part of the funding by inviting more than 56 residents to pay to have their likenesses included.
The alley known as Rubin's Way, west of Main Street, holds one of the collection's most elaborate additions: a mural called Naperville Loves a Parade, painted in a deliberately Norman Rockwell style by lead artist Dodie Mondero along with Marianne Lisson Kuhn and Adela Vystejnova. It took four years to complete and shows roughly 300 people, 100 buildings, and a scattering of dogs, balloons, and tractors watching a parade go by. Community members and businesses paid between $400 and $3,000 to have their image or company name included, raising $220,000 toward the project. Mondero also hid the face of a Naperville resident named Greg Haldeman fifteen to twenty-five times throughout the scene, tucked into dollar bills and help-wanted signs, so viewers can play their own version of Where's Waldo while they look.
Even the parking structures got attention. The deck on Van Buren Avenue includes a stained glass mural, a detail Bobosky likes to point out on walking tours of the collection.
"You won't find too many parking decks around the country that have a stained glass mural."
The clearest overlap between Century Walk and the Naperville Art League sits on the exterior wall of the Naperville Fine Art Center & Gallery on North Center Street. The mural there, World's Greatest Artists, was designed by Mike Venezia and painted by Marianne Lisson Kuhn, stretching 67 feet wide and 12 feet tall with portraits of 32 famous artists alongside two local ones. It counts as a Century Walk piece and belongs to the Art League's home building at the same time, which is about as close as these three programs get to actually sharing something.
The Person Who Built Half of This Just Stepped Back
Bobosky announced his retirement from Century Walk leadership in 2024, closing out roughly three decades at the helm of the project he helped start in 1996. The organization's Citizens Action Committee, made up of volunteers who solicit sponsorships, plan events, and lead tours, is the structure meant to carry the work forward. What that looks like without its founding chairman is still an open question. Fifty-three locations is a lot to maintain and a lot to build on, and whether the pace of new additions holds, slows, or shifts toward maintenance of what already exists depends on decisions that haven't been made publicly yet.
Where the Three Collide This Weekend
If you want to see all three programs in the same afternoon, this is the weekend to do it. The Riverwalk Fine Art Fair runs Saturday and Sunday along Jackson Avenue, with more than 100 juried artists working in painting, photography, glass, ceramics, jewelry, wood, and metal sculpture, and free admission for anyone who walks through. New this year, the DuPage Symphony Orchestra performs live at the Free Speech Pavilion throughout the day Saturday, its 73rd season under longtime music director Barbara Schubert.
The Dog Days sculptures should still be up in some form. In past years the painted dogs have stayed on display into mid-September before the Alliance rotates them out for auction, so there's a reasonable chance a few are still standing on their sponsor corners even after this year's voting wrapped up. And Century Walk, being permanent, is the backdrop to both events whether anyone mentions it or not.
A short loop that touches all three without much backtracking:
- Start at Genevieve's bench outside Barnes & Noble on Washington Street.
- Walk to the Van Buren Avenue parking deck to find the stained glass.
- Cut through Rubin's Way to see Naperville Loves a Parade and try spotting Greg Haldeman.
- Follow the Riverwalk west toward Eagle Street to see Landforms.
- Continue to the Free Speech Pavilion for the DuPage Symphony Orchestra set on Saturday.
- Finish at the Naperville Fine Art Center & Gallery on North Center Street for World's Greatest Artists and whatever fair activity is happening on Jackson Avenue nearby.
What Changes Once You Know the Difference
None of this changes what downtown Naperville looks like on a Tuesday. The bench sculpture is still just a bench sculpture if you don't know Genevieve Towsley's name, and the painted dogs are still just painted dogs if you don't know they trace back to a charity tradition older than most of the businesses currently sponsoring them. But knowing that these pieces come from three institutions with three different reasons for existing changes how you read the town itself. It means downtown wasn't planned as a finished picture. It's an accumulation, decades of separate groups deciding independently that this particular six blocks was worth adding something to.
If you're the kind of person who notices things like a stained glass parking deck and wants to know more about what makes a neighborhood tick before you decide to plant roots in it, that instinct is worth listening to. Jill Clark works with people who care about those details, and offers a private consultation for anyone thinking seriously about calling one of these blocks home.
