SHINE mural festival showcases street art in St. Pete

Share
SHINE mural
One SHINE organizer, Casey Paquet, stands in front of Ricky Watt's mural. By Seán Kinane/WMNF News.

St. Petersburg’s SHINE mural festival is going on now. Here’s a video report from the first one, two years ago:

In case you haven’t seen the brightly painted buildings, St. Petersburg is in the middle of a mural festival. The SHINE festival is bringing together more than a dozen street artists, including Ricky Watts from the San Francisco area. This morning Watts stopped painting for a few minutes and lowered his bucket truck to ground level to talk with me about the SHINE mural festival and his art on 1st Avenue North near 6th Street.

“This mural is a wall that is 96 feet by 32 feet wide. It’s the largest mural that I’ve ever painted. And it’s part of the SHINE festival.”

One SHINE curator, Chris Parks, is an artist who goes by the name Pale Horse and has a gallery at 3rd Avenue North and 9th Street.

“Yeah, there’s tons of walls (available for new murals in St. Petersburg). That’s what’s kind of nice about here, being Florida; we don’t really have a lot of beautiful architecture, so we sort of use that to our advantage. You know, there’s a lot of these flat, dull, you know, tan buildings you don’t even notice. But when you start looking for walls you realize this is just like a gold mine for artists to come here. There’s festivals all over the place, but St. Pete is special in that way where it’s just like everybody that comes in here is really loving St. Pete, you know can’t believe this little place they’ve never heard of is so cool. But then there’s just so much room to grow and so many walls here to make these tan grey dull buildings look great.”

Ricky Watts interview:

Casey Paquet interview:

Leave a Reply

  • (will not be published)

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

You may also like

student meal
Next school year Hillsborough public schools are offering free meals

Hillsborough Public Schools are offering students free meals for the...

Correspondence Through Poetry. A Mind-Numbing Week.

Father Verses Sons: A Correspondence in Poems by Herbert Gold...

The sound of change: Music’s influence on anti-war and human rights movements

Throughout history, music has served as a powerful catalyst for...

a man in a tye dye shirt talking on a radio microphone
Recreational pot for Florida is on the ballot this fall—let’s talk about it

In four months, Florida voters have the opportunity to vote...

Ways to listen

WMNF is listener-supported. That means we don't advertise like a commercial station, and we're not part of a university.

Ways to support

WMNF volunteers have fun providing a variety of needed services to keep your community radio station alive and kickin'.

Follow us on Instagram

The Morning Show Thursday
Player position: