Today in Street Art: Atlanta’s secret murals

Did you know that Atlanta has a graffiti piece that’s 655 feet long and 100 feet wide? Here’s an even more interesting trivia fact: If you have ever driven the John Lewis Freedom Parkway, you were probably within a few feet of that very graffiti piece and didn’t even realize it. Sometimes, street art is like that. Occasionally, a hidden gem of artwork is tucked away in a secretive location that you can’t see from the street, in a place where you would have no reason to look. To find it, you would need to be told about it by someone who knows about it. So now I’m going to tell you about a few of Atlanta’s hidden gems of street art.

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Artist: VAYNE

Location: John Lewis Freedom Parkway, just west of the Beltline.

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A roof structure sometimes called the “bridge to nowhere” spans a 655-foot-long stretch of Freedom Parkway next to the WSB TV transmission tower. The roof protects cars from falling ice that might form on the tower’s guy wires during winter storms. Atlanta graffiti writer VAYNE used 500 gallons of paint to transform the top surface of the structure into a mega-artwork called Graffiti for the Gods. The piece, which can only be seen from above, was self-funded by the artist, who scrounged paint from places such as Facebook Marketplace and from contractors who had extra. In a recent interview with GULCH magazine, VAYNE told how he discovered the location. “I saw a drone video by QuanATL. They were filming on the Beltline, and they flew up to get a pan of the city. This was in the drone shot. And I was like, holy fuck. This would be crazy.” The finished piece depicts his signature VAYNE spread in massive black and white letters on a yellow background. Love the look? Photographic prints of this work can be purchased through Cat Eye Creative.

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Artist: Paper Frank (Frank Dunson)

Location: 3116 Benjamin E. Mays Drive SW, Atlanta.

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A narrow driveway to the right of Jean Childs Young Middle School in Southwest Atlanta takes you to a field behind the building. There you will find a community garden collaboratively created by The Atlanta Public Schools, Goodr Inc. (an organization dedicated to reducing food waste), Earthgang (an Atlanta based hip-hop duo) and Universal Music Group. The garden teaches the school’s students about the value of fresh, healthy food and environmental sustainability while providing fresh produce for the school. At the centerpiece of the garden is a mural featuring the Earth surrounded by vegetables that was painted by Frank Dunson, aka Paper Frank. The artist was thinking about more than just vegetables as he was painting.“It was important to me to paint this mural for the garden, mainly for the kids to see that they, too ,can one day paint murals or be an artist for a living,” said Dunson.

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Artist: AG PNT

Location: 512 Flat Shoals Ave. SE, Atlanta.

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AG PNT (pronounced A G Paint) describes himself as a nomadic visual artist living on the road, traveling across the United States. His contribution to OuterSpace Project 2024 was an eclectic still life mural hidden in a recess well down a narrow passageway between two buildings in East Atlanta Village. To make matters even more confusing, the building has a Flat Shoals Avenue address, but the alleyway only has street access from Glenwood Avenue. This unique mural was inspired by AG PNT’s love for I Spy books in which children rely on rhyming clues to find specific objects in intricate photographs packed with miscellaneous items. The artifacts depicted in AG PNT’s still life are a combination of his possessions, with some owned by his friend and fellow artist Ash Hayner, aka Wolfdog. Do you share an affinity for classic I Spy books? If so, you’re in luck. There’s an I Spy exhibit coming to the High Museum of Art in August.

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Artist: Ryan Coleman

Location: 780 Johnson Ferry Road NE, Atlanta.

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In Sandy Springs, Johnson Ferry Road, Glenridge Drive and the Glenridge Connector form a triangle surrounding an office building. On the Glenridge Drive side, hidden behind a decorative wall, sits a tiny loading dock that you wouldn’t be able to see when driving or even walking by. Ryan Coleman elevated this obscure little cargo zone into an immersive work of art. “The mural was commissioned by the building owner to brighten up an otherwise drab loading dock area, which a number of employees also use as an entrance/exit. My goal with the design was bright, fun and optimistic,” said Coleman. His murals feature colorful gestural abstractions that he describes on his website. “The scribble represents a spontaneous gesture at the inception of an idea. I love the idea of freezing that gesture — memorializing it — as a constant reminder of what’s possible.” 

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Artist: Kevin Bongang

Location: 1776 Peachtree St. NE, Atlanta.

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If you are heading east on 26th Street, and if you look to the left, and if you don’t blink as you go by, you might notice a tiny splash of color in a little alcove marking the side entrance to the building. What appears from the street to be only a small artwork is the proverbial tip of the iceberg of a 120-foot-long mural that extends into an L-shaped pedestrian breezeway. “I wanted it to feel like the mural welcomed the viewer into the building,” said artist Kevin Bongang. “The building’s architecture felt very geometric, and I wanted the mural to feel the same. I was born in Cameroon, Central Africa, and have always loved African masks and all their expressions.  I garnered some inspiration from my culture in the abstraction of the mural — the more the viewer looks, scattered in the juxtaposition of various shapes and colors, birds and faces start to appear.”

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Artist: Dannie Niu

Location: 5224 Buford Highway NE, Atlanta.

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Driving down bustling Buford Highway, it might be easy to miss The Huaya International Cultural Center. You certainly wouldn’t have any reason to look behind it. The Center wanted a traditional Chinese landscape painting on the huge wall in the back parking lot. Re-creating the ink-washed aesthetic on a concrete wall is a difficult task, but Dannie Niu was up to the challenge. “I have always tried to express Chinese cultural elements through my own artistic language. So, in the end, what I created was a long mural scroll — a Chinese landscape interpreted through my own understanding and style,” said Niu. “In the painting, you can see rushing waterfalls and deep blue mountains. There are peaceful villages, as well as people living in the mountains, rowing their boats out onto the lake to fish. Everywhere everything is peaceful, loveful and enjoyable.”

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Artists: 1010 and Hopare

Location: 231 Peachtree Center Ave. NE, Atlanta.

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As part of a major renovation to the Peachtree Center complex in 2019, Living Walls was commissioned to install two murals: Paradigm Shift by Polish-German artist 1010 is in a rooftop courtyard visible only from above. It’s op art featuring concentric organic shapes creating a mirage of three-dimensional depth. The second mural, titled Symphony, by French artist Hopare, is downtown’s largest artwork, featuring three faces looming over Peachtree Center Avenue. Here’s the odd thing about these two murals located right next to each other — either one could be the hidden one. From the perspective of those walking down Peachtree Center Avenue, the 1010 mural facing the sky is invisible. And from the perspective of the thousands working in Peachtree Center, looking down from the windows of the office towers, the Hopare mural is absent. The only way to see both at the same time is with an exactly positioned drone.

So now you are in the know about some of Atlanta’s secret murals. As an avid lover of murals and street art, I believe it’s always best when you see these works in person, so I encourage you to go check them out for yourself. And tell your friends about them, too. They are just too cool to remain a secret.

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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.