Rural street art: graffiti beyond the city

The concept of street art tends to evoke images of inner city streets decorated with murals. But increasingly the practice of street art is moving beyond the confines of the city and out into rural and remote settings.

A recent feature in Understory Magazine highlighted the growing rural graffiti movement as an example of rural creativity.  Highlighting “Epic Rural Murals” from spray-painted silos in Australia to barn wall murals in the American Midwest, the article argued that rural creatives are catching up with their urban counterparts in graffiti production.

One of the main street art clusters featured is the Australian Art Silo Trail, which features hundreds of locations, predominantly in eastern Australia. As well as giant murals on silos, the trail also features Water Tower Art and Street Art Towns.

Alice Springs Street Art Town

Many rural street art projects were inspired by the example of Chemainus in Canada, which used street art as part of an economic development strategy after the local logging industry collapsed. The Chemainus Festival of Murals Society was established in 1987, and now manages what it labels  “the world’s leading community-driven art tourism experience.”

Today the rural mural trend has become bigger and bolder, with vast paintings on the side of grain silos and large barns. The Australian Art Silo Trail argues “The Silo Art Movement is more than a visual spectacle; it is a dynamic force of transformation and rejuvenation. In its majestic strokes and grandeur lie the seeds of renewal for many towns and communities that once teetered on the brink of obscurity.”

Silo Art Movement App

In other words, silo art is a good example of creative placemaking applied to rural spaces. The placemaking aspects of rural street art are examined in New Zealand by Harvey Perkins,  Michael Mackay and Chiara Massacesi, who argue that street art is an element of creative place-making in rural areas internationally, and that creative place-making has strong links to rural cultural and economic regeneration. They highlight murals in rural towns in New Zealand’s South Island. Over the period of fieldwork from 2017 to 2022, the researchers saw the number of murals in these places grow. For example, the Katikati Murals are now featured on Tripadvisor (scoring 4.4 out of 5, #1 of 19 things to do in Katikati).

Perkins et al. say such initatives have been supported by local people and they are often linked to extra-local networks of ideas, resources and entities including the local and central state and a variety of businesses with global reach. This is a way of bringing in resources and visitors to rural and remote places.

South Island Grain Silo murals

As a feature on grain silos reported  “Some people thought we were crazy and wondered why would anybody want to put art on the grain elevator” but “The mural has had a big impact on business because people now stop rather than just driving through town, but what it’s done for community pride and morale is even greater,” It also generates tourism, as in the case of a huge mural on the grain silo in Brim, Victoria. “Brim is 225 miles from Melbourne and has a population of only 170 people, but many days there are 1,000 people who come to look at that mural.”

New Deal mural from the 1930s

Rural street art has a long history. For example, artists were commissioned by the Roosevelt administration to produce murals as a morale-boosting campaign for rural communities under the New Deal in the 1930s. A total of 1,371 murals were painted by 850 artists who typically were paid $700 for their work. These were often installed over the doorway of the local post office, which has ensured that many survive to the present day. The post office in Russell, Kansas gets “a lot of visitors who are aware of the mural project and make it a point to stop when in this area. Locals are especially proud because ours shows wheat farming and oil production—major factors in the local heritage.”

This shows that rural street art can not only have an important contemporary impact on visitation, but also a long-lasting legacy of creative placemaking.

For more on cultural and creative tourism in rural and remote areas, see the Crocus Project.