Provo artist Billy Hensler painted this mural on the side of Mr. Muffler in South Salt Lake in 2018 as part of the first Mural Fest. The mural was recently defaced by a tagger. Image by Shawn Rossiter.
Is it something about the mural itself, this lone wolf set against a giant full moon? Or is it its very visible location, on the corner of West Temple, where it announces itself to 2100 South’s westbound traffic? There must be something, because this is at least the third time that the Mr. Muffler mural, painted by Billy Hensler in 2018, has been tagged. Surprisingly, of the more than 70 murals spread throughout South Salt Lake’s Creative Industries Zone, this is one of only a handful that have been defaced by taggers and graffiti artists over the years.
South Salt Lake has long been a home to murals. Twenty years ago, well before the current explosion of public art murals, University of Utah professor V. Kim Martinez began taking students to the area to paint murals as part of her Perspective REALIA class. If you’ve traveled on the TRAX Blue Line you’ve probably seen some (admittedly, two decades after their creation, they are a bit faded). A few others are spread along West Temple and Main Street, including at Bonwood Bowling. Shae Petersen, who goes by the can name SRIL, was also attracted to the industrial grit of the area. He painted “Godlike,” the giant Greek myth-inspired mural on the side of Stone Unlimited, in 2015. He tried for another large one, on the side of the Exotic Kitty strip club, in 2017, but city officials shut it down. Petersen’s proposed mural called for a female figure and a panther, in shades of bright purple, pink and red. City planners said it wasn’t a mural but an advertisement, and as such violated zoning rules. The two parties tangled over matters for a couple of months until Petersen dropped the project when the city came up with a new rule: any murals would have to be done in a neutral earth-tone palette.
“Peeking,” which is visible from TRAX’s Blue Line, was created by V. Kim Martinez and her University of Utah class in 2004.
SRIL’s “Godlike,” on the corner of 3300 South and 300 West, was painted in 2015. Image by Shawn Rossiter.
Three months later, South Salt Lake’s first Mural Fest was launched (spoiler alert: not all the murals were in earth tones). Municipalities were still trying to figure out what to make of graffiti, street art and murals. Derek Dyer and Lesly Allen wanted to show them the way. Dyer is executive director of the Utah Arts Alliance, which hosts the annual Urban Arts Festival in Salt Lake City, and Allen was, until last year, director of the South Salt Lake Arts Council. They launched the festival in 2018, hoping to revitalize the city’s Creative Industries Zone with what the city now touts as “Utah’s largest open-air gallery.” The original goal was to add 100 murals in ten years. Eight years in, Mural Fest has already completed 66 murals with 13 more to be unveiled at the 2025 event. During the unveiling party, scheduled for May 10 from 4 to 8 p.m., attendees can enjoy a self-guided mural walk, live music, food trucks, and interactive art activities.
Since Mural Fest’s inauguration, South Salt Lake’s core has transformed. Highrise residences, pubs, coffee shops, and creative hubs now mingle with the area’s historic industrial businesses. Mural Fest has been along for the ride, some would argue propelling it. Today, it’s hard to walk more than a half block in the downtown area without seeing giant wildlife, colorful flowers or majestic mountains (to name a few of the more common motifs at Mural Fest).
Not that the festival hasn’t run into some potholes along the way. In its early years, a tagger swept through West Temple, defacing several of the earliest murals. Look closely today and you may see the touchups. While some business owners have embraced the idea (Mr. Muffler hosts murals on three sides of its building), Allen has said she was surprised to learn how hard it is to find a business willing to host a mural. The festival has had to go ever further afield in search of blank and willing walls: TRAX’s S-line, at the city’s eastern periphery, has become a new hub of activity; Sandra Fettingis, a Denver artist, is working on her mural at Dented Brick Distillery, just around the corner from one of Martinez’s original murals near 3300 South. As if it set an example for the curious, South Salt Lake has had its city hall painted, front and back. Tastes vary, and as you might expect, not ever resident has enjoyed every mural. The project almost got derailed in 2023 when one resident complained about “Salt Lake Sally,” a mural painted on the side of the UDOT wall facing their house. (It’s one thing to see a mural while driving. It’s another to wake up to one outside your front door—especially one that’s not exactly in earth tones.)
Texas artist DAAS has returned to Mural Fest to finish painting the exterior of South Salt Lake’s City Hall. The south side of the exterior was painted in 2024 and the artist has been working on the north side this year. Image by Steve Coray.
Mike Murdock’s mural can be found along the pedestrian corridor of UDOT’s S-Line. Image by Steve Coray.
Peggy Flavin’s mural in progress along TRAX’s S-Line. Image by Steve Coray.
Despite the speedbumps, Mural Fest moves forward toward their five-score goal, attracting artists from all over the world. The artists in the first Mural Fest were all Utah locals, but now the festival receives hundreds of applications every year and this year it will also be the host of the National Mural Awards. The 2025 Mural Fest will feature several international artists, including Angie Jerez (Colombia), GOMAD (the Netherlands) and Mantra (France). The biggest name on this year’s roster is Kelly Graval, aka RISK, an artist often credited as one of the founders of the West Coast graffiti scene.
Mike Murdock is one of three local artists participating in this year’s festival. He may be best known for his painting on “the whale” at the intersection of 9th South and 1100 East (the sculpture itself was created by Stephen Kessler). Murdock blends humor, folklore, skate culture, and cosmic themes in his work, which often walks a line between fine art and absurdity. You’ll find his wall along the S-Line corridor.
Nearby you’ll find Peggy Flavin’s mural celebrating an active lifestyle. Flavin is a muralist, illustrator, and designer with a BFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she studied Environmental Design and Painting. Her work explores themes of sustainability, nature, and public engagement, often transforming unconventional spaces such as indoor climbing walls and solar panel arrays into vibrant works of art.
Connor Weight is the other local. For this year’s fest he’s partnered with a local youth group to create a vibrant “Be Kind” mural, a project made possible through the support of One Kind Act A Day and the leadership of South Salt Lake Mayor Cherie Wood. The Mayor, a longtime advocate for youth engagement through the arts, helped initiate the collaboration by encouraging ties between the Arts Council and the kindness-focused nonprofit. Their donation funded an additional mural wall, allowing Weight to guide a group of enthusiastic young artists in expressing a powerful message of unity and compassion.
Connor Weight works with children from the “One Kind Act a Day” program to create a mural for the 2025 Mural Fest. Image by Steve Coray.
South Salt Lake was a pioneer. Now it seems every small town in the state has at least a couple of murals. Municipalities have learned to embrace public art murals for a variety of reasons. They can be tools for community building, economic revitalization, and cultural expression. As South Salt Lake has proven, they can help define a city’s identity, especially if the murals reflect local history, values, and voices. When community members, especially youth, are involved in the creation process, murals become platforms for engagement and education. Sometimes, as we reported recently on Tooele’s public art murals, the decision to embrace painted walls begins as a practical matter: public art has been linked to reduction in vandalism and heightened perceptions of safety—give the kids some legal walls and maybe you’ll see fewer illegal walls.
Even so, as that lone wolf on the side of Mr. Muffler reminds us, murals are not a perfect solution. And they may not be a permanent one. They are vulnerable—to weather, to time, to graffiti, to shifting tastes. The murals by Martinez and SRIL, now decades old, are fading. South Salt Lake and the other places who have jumped on the mural train, will, sooner or later, face the inevitable question: what happens when the paint chips, the message dates, or the wall needs repurposing? Do we restore or paint over? Preserve or start fresh? In this way, murals are like the communities they inhabit—vibrant, imperfect, ever-changing.
While some businesses have been reluctant to embrace the 21st-century mural trend, new apartment buildings have been eager adopters, using the murals as placemaking devices. Here, French artist Mantra works on a mural for the new One Burton apartment complex on Main Street. Image by Shawn Rossiter.
Learn more about Mural Fest at themuralfest.com.
We’ll have full coverage of all the new murals in upcoming posts at 15 Bytes.
Corrections: We have corrected some items in the original article. South Salt Lake Arts Council never approved SRIL’s proposal for the Exotic Kitty mural. And in our first version, we missed one of the local artists: Peggy Flavin.
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The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.
Categories: In Plain Site | Visual Arts
Local artists also include Peggy Flavin, one of the three local mural artists, as well as Andre Hogan, Kacy Krummel and Bri Forcier as the Apprentice Artists participating in Mural Fest 2025.