The Most Beautiful Murals of 2020
By Widewalls Editorial
December 22, 2020
What a year! No one could have predicted 2020: to call it challenging would simply be an understatement. The whole world was brought to a halt and this also applied to street art, unfortunately: many festivals, exhibitions and events were canceled or postponed, as lockdowns and travel bans were imposed.
But if the art world machine stopped, art itself didn't! Many individuals did many great things in quarantine: there was the Home Mural Fest, Pejac (whose project ranks quite high on our list, hint-hint) invited people to create and share their quarantine art, and numerous artists had Instagram lives in which they shared details about their life and creativity.
Many couldn't keep away from the streets either: with the eruption of the Black Lives Matter Protests earlier this year, street artists went out and joined by their communities they painted murals in support of the ongoing fight against racial injustice. Artists also expressed their solidarity with all the front-line workers, still fighting for everybody's lives as we speak, by painting beautiful tributes in so many ways. Many aspects of the ongoing pandemic are (being) immortalized in so many works of art, creating a unique visual history of one of the most unprecedented moments of our lives.
During grim days such as these, art remains a great solace and consolation. Here's hoping for a better 2021 and many more great murals and street art pieces for us to enjoy!
In the meantime, below is our selection of 55 most beautiful murals and street art pieces of 2020, voted by our own Instagram followers and Street Update readers!
35. Nicholas Galanin in Sydney
This intriguing mural called Shadow on the land, an excavation and bush burial is more of a site-specific made by Nicholas Galanin in Sydney’s Hyde Park. This intervention is the excavation for the hated statue of Captain James Cook, the 18th-century British Royal Navy captain who landed on the territory now known as Australia.