Siler City, North Carolina.

This week, Patti Moed challenges us to “highlight Street Art in any form, such as posters, graffiti, prints, stencils, sculptures, or installations.” You can read her entire challenge post here. I don’t have many photos of graffiti, but I immediately thought of buskers performing their specific artistic talents on the streets of our country. Then I remembered Siler City, North Carolina. With the small town’s downtown area suffering the malaise afflicting most cities in this day of Amazon and “free shipping”, a group of concerned citizens put together the Siler City Mural Society. In 2001, the group commissioned three murals to be painted on the blank walls of downtown buildings. A small sample of the murals added since then are featured in my challenge response this week. If you want to learn more and see a few more of the murals, you can check out my original Travel Tuesday post here. In the meantime, here are a few of my favorite examples.

This mural on the outside of Ace Hardware depicts the inside of the store at an earlier time.

This mural depicts Siler City’s downtown sometime near the turn of the 20th century. It’s painted on the building that is depicted in the mural at the far left. Obviously that building is still standing. The two buildings at the near right are now gone, and except for the paved street and a traffic light, the intersection view hasn’t changed much.

An homage to those early Coca-Cola ads is featured on one brick facade. When you visit Siler City, stop at the downtown coffee shop and pick up a map. It features the locations and descriptions of the many murals. Get some exercise and take a leisurely walking tour.

John Steiner