On a sloping embankment on the north side of Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital’s Research and Education building, at 600 5th Street South, a mural bursts with magenta, blue, orange, green and gold, spreading out along the block and broken into sections by two flights of stairs leading up to the building. 

The artist Brain Storm partnered with the St Pete Youth Farm to create a work inspired by diversity and inclusion in STEAM professions – Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math. 

The mural is in three low sections, and on a slight slope. Because the ground rises, the top of the mural is always a straight line but the bottom edge varies. 

The section on the left is 39 feet wide. The left edge is 8 feet high, but the right side’s only 7 feet high when it stops for a narrow set of stairs. 

The center section is the smallest, just 21 and a half feet wide. It’s 7 feet high on the left edge but 6 feet 3 inches when it breaks off for a double wide set of stairs. 

The part on the right is the longest, almost 91 feet wide. The left edge of this area is 6 feet high, but thanks to the slope, it’s just 4 feet high on the right. 

Altogether, the mural is huge, 151 feet wide. 

On the left section, a white man is painted in profile, from the shoulders up, leaning to look through a microscope. 

At the center, a young woman pours fluorescent light green liquid into a flask. The woman is utterly absorbed in what she’s doing. 

She’s painted from the shoulders up. The top of her head goes past the edge of the mural. Her long dark hair is pulled back and she wears blue surgical gloves and a white lab coat. Her skin is brown, shadowed as if light is falling on her from the left. 

On her right is a gigantic flask tilted to the right, so big the bottom of the flask is cut off by the ground. The flask pours a gushing flow of blue liquid off the right edge of the mural. 

In the center section, the liquid from the flask becomes a breaking wave in bright shades of blue, rolling across a crimson and magenta sunset. The wave is breaking to the right, in the same direction that the real waves in the Bay a few blocks east of us are breaking. 

A red and orange crab that’s taller than the wall is painted from knees up. One claw is raised above the wave, up to the top of the wall, like the crab is waving at you. 

A sea turtle almost as tall as the wall swims on a curving blue wave. 
A crashing wave causes an enormous jellyfish to rise. The jellyfish has a fluorescent crimson body with vertical purple markings – and an elaborate tangle of orange and magenta tentacles, like many flouncy petticoats. 

The jellyfish is swimming toward the thick, curling arms of an enormous octopus. 

The largest breaking wave of all curls past the octopus, toward a huge grey manta ray diving under the edge of the whitecaps. Two fish with bright orange and white vertical stripes swim to the left, leaving a trail of blue bubbles. 

The bubbles float beside a young girl with brown skin and long, dark brown hair, reading a hardback book. The title of the book is, “JOURNEY.” 

Beside her, scrawled white capital letters spell out, “WE DREAM IN COLORS BORROWED FROM THE SEA.”

Chris Roberts, the artist known as Brain Storm, owns the Urban Ink Tattoo Company and is a designer, painter, cinematographer and multimedia artist. He uses his art to promote positive messages and worked on this with volunteers from the St Pete Youth Farm, an urban farm where students learn to grow their own food, and become entrepreneurs and leaders. 

This mural was sponsored by NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA Fisheries’ Southeast Regional Office is a few blocks away. 

The mural is part of an initiative by the St. Pete Innovation District, to increase diversity and inclusion in the sciences – and to draw attention to marine science education and careers here in St. Pete.

Brain Storm – Accessible Descriptive SHINE 2020 Mural Audio Tour

This mural by Elle LeBlanc ["Le Blahnk"] is called Pop Art Plastic. It sprawls across an enormous warehouse wall at 2333 3rd Avenue South. The mural faces north, 17 feet high and 145 feet wide. 

It suggests a seascape from a children’s book – simple shapes in vibrant pink, yellow, blue and black against a white background. Abstract curves and shapes mix with fish and examples of plastic pollution. The mural is painted around the many square, barred windows high up on the wall, and crosses over the window frames.

A thick pink band spans the entire image, bending and swooping around the other figures, all the way from left to right. 

On the left side of the mural, eight rounded yellow pillars rise halfway up the wall, like a fence, or abstract coral. A yellow and pink fish swims to the right, and a smaller black fish swims to the left. Between them floats a plastic shopping bag in white, painted with black capital letters that say “THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU.” The letters are bent and crinkled, like the plastic bag.  

Perforated coral-like discs of red and black float on either side of a tall green abstract coral branch bending to the left, and a zig-zag purple squiggle. An arc of small black circles rises almost halfway up the wall. 

Near the center of the mural, a bulbous light blue shape with a circular white center arcs almost as high as the wall. Three gold half-circles near the top echo the shape of a candelabra, and touch the top of the blue shape. 

The wide pink band dives below the mural and then up, across the big blue shape. 

In the white circle at the center of the blue, a small black fish with a perky line of dots for eyelashes, swims to the right – across the pink band and close to two large plastic water bottles, painted in black and white. 

A lavender disc, a wavy vertical orange squiggle, and bulbous dripping shapes of green and yellow, move across the wall. A cluster of small black arches bubbles up. 

A black fish shaped like a 2-liter plastic bottle swims to the left, along the bottom of the wall, under three floating plastic bendy straws.

A large black semi-circle perforated with white dots swoops down from the top, as the pink band undulates across the wall. Circles of red and blue bob in the imaginary water, beside another black fish swimming to the right. 

Schools of black vertical rectangles hover at the bottom and cluster at the top of the wall, with abstract coral shapes of yellow, green and red. 

A fish with pink head, yellow body and red and blue fins swims to the right. Just before the thick pink band hits the right edge of the wall, it passes under a looming stack of four fat black concentric arches, horseshoe-shaped and standing out among the pastel colors.

About a foot from the wall’s edge, just below the fat pink line, a small tilted yellow dome is painted with the tiny words “in memory of Nick Moses” in black capital letters.

Back at the beginning of the wall, the artist’s signature is stylized in the bottom left. A tall, stretched-out capital “E L” on top, and just below, “L E.” Her Instagram handle is beside it on the right, lying sideways. 

These bright colors and abstract shapes are recognizable in other work by Elle LeBlanc. About this mural, she explains, “Speaking about plastic pollution in our oceans has become a familiar subject, especially living in a coastal city. 

“With that in mind, I wanted to be direct in the message of my mural, without being redundant—especially because I feel St. Petersburg, specifically, has taken measures in the last few years to begin a huge effort to minimize the plastic waste we produce here. 

“Staying true to my aesthetic, I intended to create a colorful atmosphere that makes the subject approachable – and ultimately leaves viewers with a sense of positivity toward the future of our efforts in reducing plastic waste.”

Elle LeBlanc is a Sarasota native, and lives and works in St. Pete.

Elle LeBlanc – Accessible Descriptive SHINE 2020 Mural Audio Tour

This mural by The Happy Mural Project is at 4025 31st Street South, on two walls of the St. Pete City Theatre. A diverse array of enormous hands are holding giant sunflowers.

The murals are 11 feet high, and wrap around the front left corner of the building. The mural on the front is 40 feet wide and faces east, toward busy 31st Street South. The one around the left side is 27 feet wide. It faces south, toward a small side parking lot.

The background of both murals is four horizontal bands of blue. The deepest blue is at the bottom, fading into pale light blue toward the top. 

On the front wall, to the left of the main entrance, a row of six enormous hands rise up from the ground, each holding a giant gold sunflower. The pointed petals are deep gold at the center and lighter on the edge. And they’re realistic – they’re not always uniform, some petals are bent, or floppy, like a real sunflower. 

The six flowers point in six different directions. Most are looking up, toward the Sun. But one near the center is facing you. And the flower on the far right, looks back at the other flowers. 

The hands that hold the sunflowers are painted from the wrist up, and hand is different. The wall includes a mix of skin tones – browns, white and Black – and a mix of genders and ages. A child’s hand is on the far left. 

The mural continues around the left corner. On the left half of this wall is a large rectangular white card, framed on top and bottom by delicate green ferns, as if it’s held in place by the leaves. 

On the card in blue is the John Lennon quote, “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.” “I’m a Dreamer” is larger, painted in flowing cursive letters. 

On the right half of this wall, two hands are clasped together – one Black, and one white, fingers interwoven in a moving gesture. These hands hold three giant sunflowers. The flower in the center points at you, and the flowers on the left and right are angled in those directions. 

Just below the right-hand flower is the signature of the Happy Mural Project – a gold vertical rectangle that’s visibly created by four stripes of paint – fatter where the brush starts and angling to a finer point as the brush runs out of color. 

The words “the” and “project” are in lowercase gold letters. “HAPPY MURAL” is larger, in light blue capital letters. 

The Happy Mural Project was sponsored by the Pinellas Community Foundation, and created during the 2020 pandemic by fine artist Alyssa Marie and her husband, Braden Everly. They create “paint-by-number” murals – drawing the outlines and and inviting other artists, and volunteers from the community, to help with the painting. 

All their murals feature bright sunflowers, representing happiness, joy and love. As their website says, “We are showering the walls of this beautiful Earth with giant sunflowers. We are a passionate couple that believes that happiness is a choice and we want to help the world smile.”

Happy Mural Project – Accessible Descriptive SHINE 2020 Mural Audio Tour

This mural by the artist iBOMS ["eye-bombs”] is called Where the Bloom Begins, at 2324 Central Avenue, at the Grand Central Brewhouse. The mural is set back from the street and takes up the right half of this west-facing wall, 30 feet high and 36 feet wide. 

The background is bright yellow. The center of the image features one of iBOMS’ signature stylized cartoon-like characters, named Ashi, a young Black male drawn from the artist’s childhood in south St. Pete. “ASHI” is written in capital letters below his left eye. 

Towering over the wall, his back is to us, but he looks over his left shoulder and down. His skin is greyish, with a bright red nose, pink circles on his cheeks and dark grey tattoos on his face, neck and back. 

His lips are an exaggerated blue-black with a red vertical stripe on the left. He wears a bright blue textured watch cap – two long black braids sneak out and dangle in front of his face. From his wide-mouth sneer, his teeth are a glittering silver, glinting in the sunlight. 

His eyes are blank white with big black X’s. He wears a heavy braided sliver necklace that glitters like his teeth. On the back of his neck, the clasp reads “iBOMS” in red letters. 

Ashi stands waist deep in water – the wavy white waterline starts a few feet from the bottom of the wall and his red plaid trousers and gold belt are muted, below the water. Clustered on top of the water is a thick red cloud of algae blooms, like invasive fat red flowers. 

The water is red, and there are three fish with their heads cut off, and an octopus with X’s on its skin, clustered around Ashi.

The algae blooms are bobbing up around his body, and seem to irritate him – one on his left shoulder, a large one on his right, even a couple on his cap. The algae and the injured sea life are echoed in his tattoos, black and white outlines of algae and dead fish. 

Across his shoulders are the words “harmful algae blooms.” “HARMFUL ALGAE” is smaller, in hand-written capital letters. “BLOOMS” is huge, also in capitals, spreading across his back in typeface. In the top-right corner of the wall is the artist’s signature.

Jabari Reed-Diop], known as iBOMS, is 21-years-old and  based in St. Petersburg. Using original characters and a variety of mediums, he challenges perceptions and creates new narratives, through the lens of his own life experience as a young African American male.

IBOMS - Accessible Descriptive SHINE 2020 Mural Audio Tour

At the south end of USF St Pete’s waterfront campus, a tall, joyously colored wall bursts with simple stylized fish and shorebirds, trees and houses. 

It’s at 1000 3rd Street South, facing west, on USF’s Harbor Hall, home to the university’s Graphic Arts department. This building was the first home of the Dalí Museum, with water lapping up against the concrete wall beside it, and sailboats in the harbor. 

The mural is tall and almost square, 48 feet wide and 35 feet high. The title is, Rooted in the Community. Artists Kenny Coil and Marc Berenguer painted a coastal wetland with mangroves in the style of a colorful children’s book. 

Pictured from beneath the water, past the land and up into the sky, the scene is a riot of orange, gold, pink, aqua blue and greens. Fish and birds are seen in profile, sharply drawn as their essential shapes – long legs and beaks and artful curves. 

The mural is made up of blocks with different colored backgrounds, almost like a collage. Starting at the bottom, the right and left corners hold fragments of a dark green shoreline, surrounded by a wide band of aqua water. 

Balanced on both corners and in the center are three stylized mangroves, trees that grow in coastal waters and are crucial to the survival of our area’s marine life. The tree in the center is lower than the ones on higher ground.

Standing tall on the green land in the lower right-hand corner is a tall, beautiful white egret, almost as tall as the trees. The bird is seen in profile, its long orange beak pointing to the left. Bright gold flowers with orange centers are scattered behind its long orange legs.  

On the shoreline fragment in the bottom left, a pair of curving orange crab arms with red tips and gold polka dots are waving, just above two red eye stalks peeking up above the ground.

Three tall buildings crowd the center. They’re built up on stilts, with many windows, and painted orange, red, pink and gold. 

On the right, a pelican floats in profile against a pink sky, swimming to the right in aqua water, floating around dark red pilings. 

The top of the mural is where the logic of sea, land and sky becomes surreal. In the upper left, where you’d expect the sky to be, a bright gold fish with red fins and vertical orange stripes swims to the right, in aqua water with red stripes of seaweed.

In the upper center of the mural, the sky is gold. White scalloped clouds float, along with two red V’s, for flying birds. 

Against the gold, two smaller mangrove trees balance their roots on the roofs of the houses below, against aqua water and a dark red horizon. The green shoreline climbs up on the right, above the roofline of the houses underneath the mangroves.

In the upper right, the sky is orange with a dark green spiky shoreline and a huge setting sun glowing gold, ringed by concentric orange circles. The sun is sinking behind green hills and tropical leaves. 

Just left of the sun, a roseate spoonbill faces left, in profile, with a curved pink body, swooping white neck and head, a long gold beak and legs made of the same dark red lines as the tree trunks. The bird bends to fish in aqua water that surrounds the tops of the houses below. Uneven parallel white lines make reflections on the water. 

The artists explain, “Mangroves are our coastline's first line of defense. In addition to serving as a home to an incredible diversity of wildlife, mangroves protect our coasts from strong waves caused by storms and erosion from rivers and ocean tides. 

“Today, these coastal habitats are threatened by overdevelopment, rising sea levels, and shrimp farming. It is essential that society adapt to prevent the destruction of these ecosystems.”

This mural is a colorful coastal community protected by mangroves, home to the Roseate Spoonbill, the Trunkfish and the Great Egret. 

Kenny Coil and Marc Berenguer lead St. Petersburg’s Break Maiden, an award-winning commercial design studio.

Kenny Coil & Marc Berenguer – Accessible Descriptive SHINE 2020 Mural Audio Tour

This mural by Lili Yuan [“Wu-an”], spelled Y-U-A-N, is called Gift, at 1661 Central Avenue, facing east. 

The mural is a circle, on a white wall roughly 23 feet tall and 20 feet wide. A woman in a rich red dress floats in a circle of bright blue water sparked by the Sun. She faces left, painted as if we’re above her, with her red dress spreading out and her long black hair floating in the water. 

This detailed image is almost like a photo – blue and white abstract patterns spark the water like reflections in a pool. The woman’s long black hair flows past her shoulders and floats in the water, spilling past the edges of the circle onto the white wall. 

Her bright red dress is sleeveless – one narrow strap is visible on her bare left shoulder as her left arm reaches out. Her skin is light. Her other shoulder’s hidden by her hair and her right arm is mostly hidden beneath her dress. Her arms are below the water, her skin patterned with sunlight. 

The skirt of her long red dress is made of narrow pleated folds, floating in a tangle mostly gathered near her knees, as if she’s floating with her knees raised. Her feet stretch to the left, draped in wet red fabric that spills out of the mural and onto the white wall.

The fingers of her left hand rise out of the pool, holding a dripping palmful of water. In her hand, a single white flower is floating.

Below the circle, in the bottom left corner of the wall, Chinese calligraphy is painted in black. It translates as, “Be like water, as water stays humble while benefiting all.”  

According to the artist, her mural shows the importance of water and strikes a chord with humans who should all be loving nature and preserving precious water resources. 

She explains, “With millions of gallons of wastewater spilled around Tampa Bay in recent years, I chose to depict an obscured female surrounded by water, to convey an implicit narrative that the water and humanity are more tightly coupled than ever.”

Lili Yuan is a painter and photographer based in Jacksonville, and originally from China. When painting, she uses rich tones and hyperrealism inspired by her photography.

Lily Yuan – Accessible Descriptive SHINE 2020 Mural Audio Tour

This mural by Mason Schwacke [“sh-waa-key”] is on a quiet stretch of 3rd Avenue, just south of USF St Pete and not far from the Coast Guard Station. It’s on a single-story industrial building at 1400 3rd Street South. 

The mural faces west, 53 feet wide and 11 feet high. It’s an underwater scene, deep blue with red coral, a swooping manta ray – and prominent sharks. 

The title is Prosperitas. The theme is Protected Sharks and Rays. The center of the mural explodes with an upside-down fan of lighter blue, like sunlight falling from the sky and spreading out in stripes. 

A Scalloped Hammerhead Shark swims toward the surface, just right of center. This “hammer” snout has sensory receptors that help the shark detect its prey. The hammerhead grows up to 11 feet long. 

On the left, coral branches swoop up in a dark red curve, that follows the shape of a huge blue Giant Manta Ray, very close to us. In the wild, the Giant Manta Ray is the Earth’s largest, up to 29 feet wide. 

This ray faces right, though it doesn’t have an obvious “face.” It has wide curving wings and two delicate prongs on the front of its head, almost like antennae. These funnel water into the ray’s mouth, as it peacefully eats plankton, the same tiny floating creatures many whales eat. 

A powerful Oceanic Whitetip Shark swims out of the far right corner of the mural, bearing down on a flowing Smalltooth Sawfish that’s between it and the hammerhead shark. 

The shark is large and grey, with a thick band of white around its open jaws. It’s exploding from the right edge of the mural, painted from its belly forward. The shark is in motion, on the hunt – and it’s the creature that stands out most vividly to drivers passing by. 

The Smalltooth Sawfish the shark is pursuing is a delicate curve of pale gold-grey. Its long, serrated, sword-like snout points toward the hammerhead shark at the center. What seem to be about two dozen jagged saw teeth on its narrow snout, are modified scales, used when the sawfish is hunting smaller fish. 

The body of the sawfish makes a graceful half-circle pointing to the left, with strong flippers and a long tail that flows like liquid. In nature, the sawfish grows up to 16 feet long. 

Many shapes of coral in shades of light and darker red bristle and curve along the base of the mural, below rich blue water that’s spattered with light blue bubbles. 

The coral ranges from rounded red forms with white spots to branches stretching up like tiny trees, and one at the center shaped like a wide stormcloud with a thick trunk. 

NOAA Fisheries, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, sponsored this mural and was involved in the design. NOAA Fisheries’ Southeast Regional Office is just up the street. They’re responsible for protecting threatened and endangered marine species.

Muralist Mason Schwacke is based in St. Petersburg. He blends street art with contemporary design to deliver symbolic messages with a vibrant, exaggerated color palette.

He explains, “I wanted to create a composition that addressed serious issues while showcasing an optimistic glow. The small things that we can easily do in our daily lives hold the potential to amount to something so much larger than ourselves.”

The ray, the sharks, the sawfish – and many other species – are threatened by pollution, coastal development and commercial fishing. And they’re put in peril by every single piece of plastic thrown into or near the sea – plastic bags and straws that choke them, and floating pieces of plastic that clog and and choke the manta rays, as they try to feed. 

Mason Schwacke says, “Our children and our children's children deserve to have a healthy planet to grow on. Without our oceans, they will have nothing.”

Mason Schwacke – Accessible Descriptive SHINE 2020 Mural Audio Tour

The small concrete building at 1957 1st Avenue South has two murals. The multicolored stripes of Gibbs Rounsavall on the west wall face 20th Street – and if you go around back, this gorgeous mural by Nneka Jones [“Ah-Ney-Ka" - the first N is pronounced like an A)”] and Bianca Burrows glows in shades of teal and blue, black, coral and crimson on the north side of the building. 

The mural is 34 feet across and 10 feet tall. The background is a deep teal green, with the title, The Global Currency, painted along the top center, in light green capital letters and a font like a dollar bill. 

The center of the mural is a striking, stylized portrait of a Black woman against a glowing crimson sky. Her natural hair rises tall, past the top of the wall, flowing out behind her in a rough-edged circle. The back of her hair is lit with flames that match the crimson wall behind her, and give her hair an echo of the setting sun. 

She’s painted from the shoulders up, looking at us over her left shoulder, eyebrows raised – not impressed at what she’s seeing. Her mouth is slightly open, as if she’s about to speak. 

Her face is crimson, like the flames in her hair. Her features are outlined in black and highlighted in pale blue and coral. Pale blue lines flow thickly down the back of her neck, and branch out around her shoulders. 

A pale blue abstract wave breaks over the right edge of the mural and surges up behind her neck. The wave curls around a huge crimson and coral fist jutting in from the upper right. The fist is attached to a powerful, muscular arm that grips a full black fishing net.  Two large fish outlined in black ride the wave, along with two dollar bills.

The inner curve of the pale blue breaking wave is a darker greenish blue. The wave splashes up against the crimson sky that frames the woman. On the left side of the mural, the pale blue outline of a stylized lotus flower branches like a fan, as tall as the wall. Three of the long spiky leaves on the left are mostly crimson. A ragged scrap of coral flows behind the plant, like a fragment of a river curving toward the left edge of the wall. 

The delicate black outlines of dollar bills float down from the upper left corner, and tangle in the flower. 

Tampa artists Nneka Jones and Bianca Burrows collaborated on this mural, painting for a purpose and using art to create active change in the community. They used a high-contrast color scheme and focused on the issue of overfishing, an industry driven by greed – and one that puts many species in danger of extinction. 

The woman is Mother Nature. The red-orange flames around her hair and face symbolize danger, and the need to preserve our land and oceans. 

The lotus flower on the left asks you to reflect. The calm light blue and teal around it emphasize that our oceans need to be protected, and that it starts with you. 

Viewed as a whole, the mural is a narrative – the price we will pay if we continue on a path of destruction. 

Nneka Jones grew up in Trinidad and Tobago, and graduated from the University of Tampa in May of 2020.  She’s known as a fabric artist and TIME magazine featured her artwork on the cover of the August 31st - September 7th issue 2020. Jones uses her artwork to speak out against injustices that get overlooked.
​
Bianca Burrows is a mixed media commercial artist, whose clients include Mercedes Benz and Major League Baseball. Whether painting on canvas or on walls, she merges acrylics with custom stencils and collage paper to create a unique style best described as refined New York street art. 

In 2019, Bianca created the Promise Tree Project for the Children’s Cancer Center, to give kids a safe creative way to express themselves through art.

Nneka Jones & Bianca Burrows – Accessible Descriptive SHINE 2020 Mural Audio Tour

Just off downtown’s waterfront Beach Drive is a tiny island called Demens Landing, home to festivals, gatherings and outdoor events. It’s just about 100 feet away, connected to the mainland by a bridge, and surrounded by sailboats. 

On the southwestern edge of Demens Landing is the St. Pete Sailing Center, at 250 2nd Avenue Southeast. On the wall that faces downtown’s waterfront is a surprising mural by Tatiana Suarez, with a beautiful cartoon-style woman, underwater, calmly embracing a manatee. 

From the pink, sparkling curve and thick skin of her serpentine tail, draped across the manatee’s tail and tangled in the mangroves – you realize that she’s a mermaid. In the tall tales lonely sailors tell, they hoped Florida’s manatees were mermaids.

The mural is 19 feet high and just over 61 feet long, beneath a sharply angled roof. The background is pale, greenish yellow, scattered with white bubbles. At the center is a manatee, a gentle and bulbous aquatic mammal found in shallow waters around Tampa Bay. 

Manatees grow about 10 feet long and weigh over a thousand pounds, with a wide, round snout and long, rounded body, two front flippers and a wide, rounded tail that propels them slowly through the water. 

A baby manatee floats beside her shoulder, also facing left. The baby is about a third of its mother’s size.  

Draping one arm gently over the manatee is the beautiful mermaid with golden brown skin, extra-large, exaggerated eyes with long dark lashes, arching eyebrows and full, rosy lips. Her long, light magenta hair flows in the water. 

Her head rests on the manatee’s back. Her bare left arm embraces the manatee, she tickles its shoulder with delicate fingers. The rest of her body is hidden behind the creature, aside from a bit of her pink, curving tail, resting on the manatee’s tail. Her expression is gentle, and curious, looking directly at you, challenging. 

The left side of the mural is a wide, rising tangle of mangrove roots and leaves, and one more yellow fish. 

This mural was sponsored by the Ocean Conservancy, a nonprofit whose mission is to protect the ocean, and the wildlife and communities who depend on the sea. 

The artist explains that her mural “is inspired by two local Floridian species who are at risk – mangroves and manatees. 

“Mangroves are tropical trees found along salty, coastal waters. They are vital to. . . marine life and. . . provide storm protection to coastal communities. They act as buffers toward storm surges and help with erosion.”

Mangrove ecosystems are crucial to fighting climate change, since they’re very efficient at absorbing and storing carbon. And they’re vital to the manatee’s survival, creating habitats and nurseries. 

Manatees are endangered, vulnerable to careless boat collisions, algae blooms and habitat loss. Tatiana Suarez explains, “I painted this mural to bring some love, color, and appreciation to St. Pete and to help bring awareness and promote mangrove conservation and regrowth.”

Born and raised in Miami, her work on both canvases and walls draws you into an ethereal world of dreamy, doe-eyed figures. It’s rich with symbols from her Brazilian and El Salvadoran heritage, and the rich colors of South America. 

‘Tati’ is a headlining muralist in festivals and Sea Walls projects around the world. Her signature, “tati,” in swooping lowercase cursive, is painted near the ground, on the curve of the manatee’s back, along with ‘2020’ and her Instagram handle, “tatunga.”

Tatiana Suarez – Accessible Descriptive SHINE 2020 Mural Audio Tour

Carbon Punishment by Brian Butler takes up two walls of the single-story building at 1101 1st Avenue North. One part of the mural faces east, visible to oncoming traffic. The other section is around the corner, on the rear of the building and facing Arlington Avenue to the north. 

The mural is part of a multimedia painting-and-music project that’s designed, Butler says, “to amplify the brutality of ocean acidification.” Each wall has a music track to accompany it. 

The mural facing 11th Street, to the east, is 60 feet wide and 7 feet tall, beneath a row of high horizontal windows. A line of giant cartoon shells are painted in the colors of the PH scale, what scientists use to measure acidity. 

Starting on the left, the color is red – on the PH scale, that means highly-acidic. Heading toward the right, the colors become pink and orange as the acidity lessens. All these shells on the left half are drizzled in splotches of black, like oil slicks. 

Toward the center, the oily black spots fade away and the shells become yellow and green – meaning neutral – and on the right, the clean shells are bright blue, meaning fairly basic, the opposite of acid. That’s how the ocean naturally is, if it’s not being poisoned. 

On the far left of the mural, a dark pink scallop shell overlaps a red coral branch. The shell appears eroded, with pockmarks and a skull’s grinning face in black, worn into the surface. Next, two shells in shades of pink, then four in shades of orange. Two other skull faces are worn into these orange shells – echoing a jack o’lantern, or a mask.. 

As the shells become yellow, green and blue, and the water becomes healthy, small blue air bubbles float up between the shells. There are two shells in green and four in blue, on the healthy side of the wall – including a clam, a sand dollar, a starfish and a branch of coral. 

The wall around the corner, facing north, illustrates the ecological collapse of the sea. This wall is 28 feet long and 9 feet high. 

On the left, against a white background with oily black swirls, a large red crab with a black skull face crawls along the brown sea floor. On the right side of the wall, the words “Carbon Punishment” in scratchy gothic orange lettering on black, take up most of the image. A black and white fish skeleton lies on the brown sea floor.

The phrase “Carbon Punishment” describes humanity's toxic relationship with carbon emissions. The typography is a nod to Tampa Bay's death metal heritage.  

Each wall is accompanied by a brutal grindcore track, composed specifically for this mural. You can find the soundtrack on your phone, at carbonpunishment.bandcamp.com.

The tracks were written and produced by Miami metal-heads Ale Campos [“AH-lay CAHM-pohs”] and Eric Hernandez, and contain lyrics that carry the same biting message as the murals.  

The music is an extension of their #deathtoplastic initiatives.

Brian Butler is based in Miami, and often works with musicians and festivals. His collection of live “Show Drawn” concert sketches was created at more than 2000 performances, and it’s been exhibited nationally.

Brian Butler – Accessible Descriptive SHINE 2020 Mural Audio Tour

This collaboration between Blaine Fontana and Plastic Birdie is called Eighth Funky Fish Town. It’s on the Pinellas Trail just east of 28th Street, between 7th and 8th Avenues South. And it’s huge - 23 feet high and 175 feet wide.

This mural was created in collaboration with PangeaSeed Foundation’s Sea Walls: Artists for Oceans program. Sea Walls is PangeaSeed Foundation’s public art project that brings the ocean into streets, educating and inspiring individuals and communities.

The artists designed the mural to look like a page out of a science book. The background is white. The left half contains seven pegs painted like protruding 3-D buttons, with information about seven of Florida’s vital local fisheries. Through NOAA regulation, they work in tandem to develop fisheries management practices to help prevent overfishing and native species eradication, to ensure healthy oceans.

In the middle of the mural is a coral reef with bright, giant Florida fish. On the right is more coral, an eel, and several arrows pointing to the right.

The pegs on the left are different sizes and colors, and all large, with painted shadows down and to the left under each peg, and text to the right about each location. A silhouette of Florida shows each location, and a thin black line connects each peg to the next. 

Number 1, on the far left, has a red peg, with information about nearby Madeira Beach and grouper fishing.

Down and to the right in orange is number 2, Panama City, known for fishing and also for sugar sand beaches. 

In yellow up and to the right is number three, Cortez, a fishing community for six generations.  

A huge light green peg, down and to the right, is number four - Apalachicola, where 90% of Florida’s oysters are harvested. 

A small slate blue peg up to the right is number five, Steinhatchee, called the scallop capital of the world. 

Below and to the right is a deep blue peg, number six, Matlacha [“mat-lah-shay”], “a funky fishing town with a lot of art.” 

Above and to the right, in purple, is number seven, Key West, “the historic Conch Republic.”

To the right of the Key West peg and swimming straight into it is a large grey manta ray, wings spread and speckled with white dots, with a white underbelly. The ray is swimming out of an enormous coral reef as high as the wall, with yellow coral branches and light and dark blue coral tubes and bulbous shapes. The reef marks a halfway point in the mural.

A large, dark red grouper with blue and purple markings, swims to the left, out of the yellow branches coral at the top. Another enormous grouper in vibrant shades of orange and white, with gold fins, swims in front of the coral and looks directly at you, unimpressed. 

Behind this grouper, wide angled bands of aqua, navy, yellow, white and gray cross the mural from top to bottom, bending in a line at the center, as if the wall were folding inwards.

A wide, tan arrow shoots out from the bands and heads to the right, ending at a clump of red coral below, and a large green eel above, jaws gaping and turned to the right. The eel is muscular and and shaded, like it’s swimming out of the top of the mural, on the hunt. 

From behind the eel, eight more wide arrows span to the right, each one outlined in a contrasting color - blues, reds, tan, white, orange and green. The arrows end near the right edge of the wall. At the top right are the artists’ signatures.

Blaine Fontana is an artist and designer based in Portland, Oregon. His work has a mythical and folkloric tone rich in symbolism.

Jeremy Nicholls, known as Plastic Birdie, is also a Portland artist. His work tends to  focus on the energy, movement, balance and harmony of chaos.

The Seawalls project says this mural “serves as a one-of-a-kind hyper-local information graphic system highlighting the importance, struggle and historical relevance of local Florida Gulf fishing communities, in a time when industrial fishing is depleting our oceans.”

Accessible Descriptive Audio Tour of St Petersburg Murals - Blaine Fontana and Plastic Birdie 2019

The St. Petersburg Arts Alliance is 501(c)3 nonprofit dedicated to advocating for our entire creative community – artists, arts and cultural organizations, and creative businesses. We support community-wide arts efforts.

St Petersburg Arts Alliance

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