A street art insider shares his highlights from Forward Warrior; the murals await your admiration

“Have a refrigerator magnet,” I say each September while stationed behind a vendor table at Atlanta’s annual Forward Warrior mural painting festival, where I represent my website the Atlanta Street Art Map  “The QR code will take you straight to the website.”

Traditionally, I pass out my rectangular promotional trinkets all day. But this year was different.

In August, my editor at ArtsATL asked me if I wanted to write an article about the 2026 event, held September 18 through September 20. Her request transformed me from a hyper-focused magnet slinger to a full-blown attendee, going to every aspect of this year’s bigger and better Forward Warrior weekend.

To provide context, I spoke with the festival’s founder and artistic director, Peter Ferrari, who launched the festival in 2012. The inaugural Forward Warrior was at Melvin Gallery, now called Lady Bird. That was before the Beltline, when Melvin was located on an unused railroad track.

“Back then, my good friend Keith Roberts owned the gallery,” Ferrari remembers. “We had the idea of doing a live painting performance because I had a lot of friends who were musicians at the time. I would go to their [music] gigs and say, ‘Hey, why don’t we have a gig for visual artists where we all live paint and people just kind of come watch us?’”

Ferrari recruited about a dozen artists at the time. They put up panels along the fence and built a temporary wall. It wasn’t until two years later, in 2014, that Cabbagetown invited Forward Warrior to paint on the half-mile long CSX Railroad wall. The event has grown every year since.

This year’s Forward Warrior kicked off after dark on Friday, September 18. The first thing that greeted me upon my arrival was a high-tech, computer-filled trailer called the MAP Rover, provided by Downtown Atlanta Inc. MAP stands for Mobile Art Projection. Rays of illumination — beamed from multiple lighting devices mounted on top — animated the animals on Ferrari’s new mural at the entrance to the Krog Street Tunnel and decorated the wall with swirling patterns. Ferrari worked with artist Daniel Phelps to create the light show.

As I continued down Wylie Street, I passed by several artists using computer-driven projectors to display outline drawings of their murals on white, buffed walls. The artists traced the frameworks of their murals by following the projected images. Artist Brittany “Gabeaux” Baum told me about the challenges of keeping the image properly aligned and dealing with limited battery life. It was interesting to witness how technology has crept into mural-making.

As I turned onto Tennelle Street, I was taken aback by the appearance of the huge word “RESIST” projected in white onto the 200-foot-tall smokestack of The Stacks Condos. It turns out that this guerilla art installation was pulled off by Evereman using a projector clandestinely installed roughly 400 feet away. Known for his sculptural art installations in multiple locations around Atlanta, Evereman shared some thoughts about his project.

“[The work is] a call to get out and vote; vote for change,” he said “ … Be good to each other, be kind, have empathy. Stick together. Let’s get through this dark place we’re in now in our country.”

At 9 p.m. I attended what organizers were calling an “ekphrastic poetry reading” at Esther Peachy Lefevre Park. A quick consultation with my “Uncle Google” revealed ekphrastic poetry to be verses written in response to viewing pieces of visual art. The plot twist came when I learned that all the poems were written by incarcerated poetry students who had only seen photos of Forward Warrior murals. The event was hosted by Hope Hilton who, in addition to being a professor of art at Morehouse College and running the school’s poetry club, also manages a creative writing program with Common Good Atlanta at Metro Reentry Facility, a state prison for men nearing release.

Hilton’s incarcerated students spent the summer honing their poetic skills. The results were read by Hilton’s Morehouse students, or by relatives of the poets, standing beside projected images of the murals that inspired the words. The imprisoned authors were identified by pseudonyms. The emotionally moving highlight of the session came when recently freed Sylvester Craig dropped his pen name of “Fast Dolla” and personally read his poem titled Time Management, inspired by a mural by Brandon Campbell featuring clocks.

The next morning, by 9:30 a.m., police had closed off Wylie Street from the Krog Street Tunnel to Tennelle Street. Fifty vendors from the Georgia Vintage Goods Market had set up their booths, and the first ambitious artists were out early painting the long wall. A mini Krog Tunnel was constructed in Peachy Park for kids to try their little hands at graffiti. I set up the Atlanta Street Art Map booth with my wife, who graciously agreed to hold down the fort while I took photos and interviewed artists. At 10 a.m., the pre-event artists’ meeting had wrapped and the festivities had officially begun with 80 muralists painting live.

My first stop was the large mural by Forward Warrior veterans Nick Turbo Benson and Liz Webb, which has anchored the west end of the wall for the past 10 years. Each year, Benson and Webb update or enhance their work. The previous artwork featured a Cabbagetown bluegrass band with various animals as musicians. This year, Benson and Webb completely re-did the mural with a new concept inspired by the 1973 Disney movie Robin Hood.

“We’re doing the fox and the rooster and we’re trying to stick with the critter theme,” Webb said. “The plan is to have it evolve every year, just like the previous one. And there’s a few Easter eggs inside of it, like Dexter.”

Many Cabbagetown residents remember Dexter as the much-beloved neighborhood cat who lived at Little’s Food Store before he recently passed.

At noon, I took a street art walking tour of the Cabbagetown Arts Ecosystem. The first half was led by Curtis Jackson, a Georgia State University history Ph.D. candidate and founder of the Krog Codex, which regularly documents the Krog Street Tunnel and other graffiti spots around the city. Jackson took us to the wall maintained by the KAOS Inc. graffiti crew at the north end of the tunnel. Although I was already familiar with the KAOS crew, I never knew that KAOS stands for Krushing Art on Subways.

As we toured through the Krog Tunnel, Jackson pointed out some of the subtleties in the artwork most would miss. For example, a Puerto Rican flag and Cuban flag are painted side-by-side. The choice creates a statement against colonialism and affirms the presence of a strong Caribbean contingent in Atlanta.

The second half of the tour was led by Antar K. Fierce, a graffiti historian, teacher at Morehouse College and co-producer of the documentary film City of Kings. Fierce regaled us with stories about the origins of graffiti, New York style writing and traditions of graffiti culture. He led us along the Reynoldstown portion of the CSX Railroad wall on which the Steel Wheels graffiti pieces are painted. Fierce co-hosted the first Steel Wheels Graffiti Festival in 2008 when the CSX Railroad provided the paint and gave the Steel Wheels writers permission to use the wall. The surface has been organically maintained by the writers themselves ever since.

After the tour, I spoke to two first-time Forward Warrior muralists as they painted. Decatur Native Luqman Coffen, aka Mr MonkPanda, is inspired by comfort food and anime. His mural showcases a cast of characters from an adventure series he created about the ingredients found in a bowl of ramen. The “Ramen Rollers” include personalities such as Mr. Ruto the fishcake and Miso the cat. Coffen was painting next to one of his mentors, Mario Daniel, who encouraged Coffen to paint at Forward Warrior.

Angela Faustina is known for her hyper-realistic still lifes featuring fruit. Her love of produce began as a little kid carving Halloween pumpkins with her dad. In college, Faustina began photographing various food products, but she was never quite satisfied with how they came out. But then, in her first oil painting class, the assignment was to do a hyper-realistic painting. Faustina chose as her subject the beloved pumpkins of her childhood. The rest is history. Her Forward Warrior mural celebrates the end of summer with blueberries, strawberries and strawberry blossoms.

Ferrari reminded me that, as remarkable as the visible results of Forward Warrior may be, they’re just the tip of the iceberg.

“Just the amount of behind-the-scenes collaboration among talented, brilliant people, with the planning, with the building of scaffolding, with collecting paint, sorting paint, artists who are sketching and editing. It’s actually even more impressive than you could wrap your head around,” he said.

Perhaps the best way to thank the artists, volunteers, supporting organizations and Cabbagetown community is to go see the murals, which live on long past the weekend’s festivities. More than 120 Forward Warrior murals are currently on display along Wylie Street between Pearl Street and Carroll Street. The murals await your admiration.

[Editor’s note: As the founder and proprietor of the Atlanta Street Art Map website, Art Rudick is a sponsor of both the Forward Warrior event and the mural by Nick Benson and Liz Webb.]

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Arthur Rudick created the Atlanta Street Art Map in 2017 after retiring from a successful career as an engineer with Eastman Kodak and the Coca-Cola Company. His first experience of art was seeing an Alexander Calder mobile as a child in the Pittsburgh airport. Rudick is ArtsATL’s street art expert and a regular contributor.