Locals flocked to Oktane Media on Sixth Avenue South in St. Petersburg to participate in the “You Are Beautiful” mural on Saturday. After seven hours of blazing heat and community-driven positivity, the wall was completed by 4 p.m. Courtesy of Dillon M. Mastromarino
By Dillon M. Mastromarino
Saturday marked the first day of St. Petersburg’s fourth annual SHINE Mural Festival — a weeklong event for local and international street artists to come together and fill the blank walls and barren underpasses of St. Petersburg with color and creativity.
This year, more than 37 artists are participating in the festival. The event runs through Sunday, and locals are encouraged to come out and watch the artists at work.
Haider Ali, a Pakistani artist, painted a truck with his distinctive style of elaborate floral patterns and calligraphy at the Museum of Fine Arts, 255 Beach Drive NE. The “jingle truck” can be spotted driving around St. Petersburg.
St. Petersburg was also chosen as a location for Matthew Hoffman’s “You Are Beautiful” campaign, a nationwide mural installation promoting love and acceptance for the community.
The campaign encouraged locals to come out Saturday to Oktane Media on 28th Street and Sixth Avenue S, to add their own messages of love and acceptance on the wall before they installed a large “You Are Beautiful” sign among the community’s positive messages.
Other artists include Bekky Beukes, a South African fine artist who explores the interchangeable relationship between light and darkness; DAAS, a Florida artist based in Japan whose art reflects quasi-geometric shaping and origami pieces; Noirs One, a newly Florida based artist from North Carolina, whose graffiti-inspired work juxtaposes patterns found in urban environments; LOOK the Weird, a German artist and founding member of The Internationally Renowned Graffiti Crew and many more.
The festival is hosted by the St. Petersburg Arts Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to raising money for the bloom of the city’s creative community.
For more information about SHINE events and the artists involved, go to https://stpeteartsalliance.org, where you can receive a map of this year’s mural installations and support the local art community.
This story was updated Oct. 8, 2018. A previous version of the story said Haider Ali would paint a truck, but the truck was completed on the first day of the festival.
