What's up with that?

Q Between the Merchandise Mart and Chicago stops on the Brown Line, there’s a list of famous people on the side of a building. Who posted it? What do the people have in common? —Aimee Weiss, Lincoln Park

A Hanging on the east side of the 325 West Huron building, artist Adam Brooks’s Freedom Wall (1994) lists the names of 70 people who embody the work’s titular ideal. Brooks, 50, an associate professor of fine art at Columbia College, spent two years surveying 600 people to compile the inventory. Martin Luther King, who tops the 72-foot-high scroll, was mentioned most often, followed by Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks. Head-scratchers include Rush Limbaugh (33), Jack “Dr. Death” Kevorkian (44), but perhaps the biggest WTF? is the empty space at No. 51. “The blank represents the people who said no one person can adequately embody freedom,” Brooks says, “and the one person who said freedom doesn’t exist.”

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