Born in Chicago Wesley Willis was an American singer - songwriter and fine artist from Chicago, who was well known in the underground for his simple but unique music. He wrote humorous, bizarre, and frequently obscene texts and won a large fan community in the 1990s. Aside from his musical solo work, he was also the front man of the Punk rock band Wesley Willis Fiasco.

Wesley Willis sketched hundreds of unusual, complicated, colored ballpoint drawings on paper, most of them showing Chicago street scenes. He sold them in the streets or gave them away to his friends. Later, they also appeared on his record covers. Chicago, the birthplace of the skyscraper, dominated Willis’s drawings with its impressive skyline as a motif. Almost obsessively, he explored the Dan Ryan Expressway, the congested freeway that connects Chicago’s South Side south mostly inhabited by African Americans with the city’s downtown. In Wesley’s work it represents a metaphor for his wish to bridge the two worlds. At age of 28, in 1989, Willis began to hear voices, which he described as "demons." Eventually, he received a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. According to him, music helped him to fight these voices in his head. Wesley Willis died on August 21, 2003 at age 40 in Skokie, Illinois, from complications resulting from chronic myeloid leukemia.

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