The first steps to spring cleaning require a mess—drawers must be emptied and cobwebbed closets gutted to make space for reorganization. Clutter must be uprooted, scattered across dusty floors, and assessed. Like James Baldwin said, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Without the initial detritus laid entirely bare, it’s impossible to determine what must be kept and what must be chucked.
Similar principles play out on the societal level, as we saw with the famously disastrous year of 2020. It took something so extraordinary as a once-a-century health crisis to expose income inequality, racial injustice, and institutional failings in an utterly unavoidable fashion. Depak Chopra also noted that “All great changes are preceded by chaos.” Improvement is an act of resilience, a trait that street artists boast in spades. It takes resilience to paint an entire building in all manner of meteorological conditions, just like it takes resilience to work day in and out at tidying up the human experience for everyone, especially the most disenfranchised individuals on this planet.
Per this resilience, artists kept painting, come hell or high pandemic. Here’s our roundup of the best murals from 2020—a lineup as rich as the issues we’ll collectively contend with over the course of our lifetimes.
Social Distancing By Pejac
In October the Spanish artist created this piece in his hometown Santander. This trompe l’oeil intervention creates an illusion of a deep gaping crevice on a rigid surface of a cement wall. Made from countless human silhouettes that are trying to escape it, the artist wanted to represent the wound that this pandemic has left and do it as a tribute to health workers for their respect and solidarity towards the victims. While the image serves as a metaphor for the damage done by the pandemic, it also literally proposes Social Distancing as a way to fix them. In between the large crowd, the artist included scenes of reunion, empathy, care, and love, suggesting a door to a better, hopeful future.
Guido van Helten’s Mankato Silos
Australian artist Guido van Helten began painting this incredible endeavor in Mankato, Minnesota in October 2019, according to an article from local outlet Kare11. The artist intended to complete this work the following spring, after a planned sojourn to South Carolina which was ultimately postponed due to the pandemic. Van Helten declined to return to Australia, instead opting to finish this project after considerable deliberation with Twin Rivers Council for the Arts, the organization that facilitated the project. This awe-inspiring series of silos speaks to the town’s Native American heritage and aims to foster cross-cultural understanding and celebration.
‘Unlock the air’ by Erin Holly
London-based fine artist and muralist Erin Holly completed ‘Unlock the air’ in Olomouc, Czech Republic in May 2020. Her Instagram caption remarked “I miss human contact with my best friends and family today. Human hands are like worlds and I genuinely want to dance around in circles.” This striking work finds its inspiration in Henri Matisse’s ‘Dance,’ which Holly witnessed on a trip to Russia several months prior. ‘Unlock the air’ embodies the energy and dynamism of its conceptual predecessor during a spring where anxious yearning for connection dominated. The mural’s high contrast and deep hues render it visually arresting, while the background of a red/black sky adds impact and a timely sense of ennui.
‘Carnival is Cancelled’ by Case Maclaim
We reported on this mural shortly after its completion in June 2020. German artist Andreas Von Chrzanowski, aka Case Maclaim, painted ‘Carnival is Cancelled’ in Aalborg, Denmark as part of KIRK Gallery’s ‘Out in the Open 2020’ series. Hannah Judah wrote that “The ‘Aalborg Karneval’ then became the artist’s metaphor of the current situation in the world, and his inspiration for this mural.” As Case noted, “A carnival is something special because it is an event where all are equal. It is the only time of the year where everybody gets to be the same – rich or poor, CEO or student, man or woman, since everybody is dressed out to be something different.” This mural, rendered in loving detail and a sumptuous, painterly style, pays sophisticated homage to a collective sense of loss shared by every citizen who missed important milestones at the hands of 2020.
Fintan Magee for Brisbane Street Art Festival in Ipswich
Australian mural maestro Fintan Magee finished this display of pure technical prowess in Ipswich, Australia for the city’s partnership with Brisbane Street Art Festival. The final product, which we reported on in August 2020, pays tribute to frontline workers, the widely heralded heroes of the coronavirus crisis. Beyond its noble intentions, this mural stands apart with the incredible technique Magee employed, creating silhouettes obscured by a painstaking arctic glass pattern. This demonstration of the artist’s talent serves to honor the place where this mural lives. A statement from Magee explained, “This work depicts two rail-workers behind beveled glass. The Arctic glass pattern in the painting was common in middle-class Queensland homes in the 1960’s and was used in French doors and windows. Some of my earliest memories of Queensland architecture was my father’s silhouette through the glass doors when he got home.”
‘YOUTH’ by Axel Void and Helen Bur
October 2020 proved a rich month for the global street art scene, perhaps as the world grew acclimated to constraints posed by the ongoing pandemic and summer climates stymied the virus’s spread. As the month began, American artist Axel Void partnered with British artist Helen Bur to create YOUTH, a large-scale celebration of the rising generation in Ferizaj, Kosovo. This endeavor made the most of each party’s individual talent to commemorate their shared experience playing soccer with the city’s youths. In an Instagram caption about the piece, Void noted “This mural takes this specific story and interaction to speak of a general thought. The youth is a palpable evidence of our present, they inhabit and shape our land and mold the things that are yet to come. The piece is a tribute to friendship, human affinity, empathy and, as the title underlines, youth.”
‘Study of a Family’ by Jofre Oliveras
Spanish visual artist and activist Jofre Oliveras completed ‘Study of a Family’ for WOOL Urban Art Festival in Covilhã, Portugal last October. Oliveras wrote in his Instagram caption that the mural “represents a current anthropological study with two generations separated by a cultural gap. The common thread of the work is the style of the portrait in colonialist photography and in classical painting, seen from a historical perspective related to power. “ Alongside the coronavirus pandemic, 2020 will hopefully be remembered for its remarkable, worldwide protests—messy activity that precipitates precisely the spring cleaning. The racial, gender, and class intersectionality demonstrated here reminds viewers, additionally, of the greater goal at stake: unadulterated equal access to liberty. Painted in this particular style, Oliveras makes a firm statement about how history will remember our era’s freedom fighters.
‘Dung Beetle’ by Murmure
French duo Murmure, composed of Paul Ressencourt and Simon Roché, painted ‘Dung Beetle’ for Points de Vue street art festival in Bayonne, France in October 2020 as well. At the very beginning of 2020, Collater.al reported that Murmure’s Garb-age project had begun introducing their motif of a black garbage bag “to raise public awareness of the ever-increasing climate crisis,” in a year that began with ravaging bushfires in Australia. In their Instagram caption, Murmure explained that in addition to espousing the importance of recycling, this mural also “questions the voluntary blindness of our societies, casting our problems away and expecting some sort of natural order to restore balance in the ecosystem.” While one might be reviled to find an unexpected dung beetle in their home, we hope for a natural helper like this to handle the byproducts of our heedless excess.
‘Diva’ by Juliana Notari
Brazilian multimedia creator Juliana Notari capped 2020 on a high note with ‘Diva,’ an excavation in the shape of a vulva measuring 33 meters high, 16 meters wide and 6 meters deep, covered with reinforced concrete and resin. When New Zealand famously tantalized the globe by quickly eradicating coronavirus within its borders, many internet opinion-havers were quick to note the country’s female leadership. America made strides for equality at the end of 2020 by electing its first female Vice President, a sometimes contentious figure and a fashionable Hail Mary, but a female Vice President nonetheless. In a year that left the world run down, the divisive ‘Diva’ encourages viewers of all gender identities to seize their own inner goddess—striking reds and the shiny, ultramodern polish of resin read aerodynamic, scintillating, efficient, and most of all, sexy. Even after all the energy expended in this year which felt like a lifetime, electricity still abounds. Good news, because we’re not tidy yet.
‘Letter’ by Basil Lst
In October 2020, Basil Lst completed “Letter,” the second installment in a diptych crafted across two facades in Sterlitamak, Russia. This emotionally effective scene creates an atmosphere at once haunting and comforting; its pastoral setting snags against its dynamism, resulting in a sense of unfinished intimate business. In an Instagram caption, the artist stated “An agonizing expectation, uncertainty, anxiety, these are the moments that I wanted to reflect in my work. An unwritten letter is a small detail on which the whole image and mood of this work is built. How many important and necessary things we would like to say to a person close to us, whom we have not seen for a long time, but the long-awaited meeting took place, but we are not able to squeeze out even a word from ourselves.” Created for the local Memorandum project with organization and technical support Supernova Art Embassy, Basil Lst’s ‘Letter’ made observations about central aspects of the human condition without even depicting humans.
