A wild boar made of cut log ends stands among the trees at Wanås Konst in Knislinge, Sweden. Hannelie Coetzee finished Gamla suggan mellan träden (Old Sow Between the Trees) in 2015, using wood, metal, oil and tar. The log ends work like pixels to form the snout, eyes and markings, and the forest closes around the animal until it nearly disappears. At Wanås, some works are expected to rot away completely.
It is one of 14 pieces in a roundup from Street Art Utopia that treats nature as material, habitat and warning. Timber, fungi, water, flowers, ice, wildlife and even living cactus pads end up in the art, or are the reason it exists.
Murals with a message
Several of the works are blunt about what is going wrong. Tyler Toews painted The Kraken for the 2018 Vancouver Mural Festival, at Watson Street and East 15th Avenue. A giant octopus grips a plastic bottle with a ship trapped inside it, beneath the waves.
Sonny Behan’s Mapache’s Stare was made for Sea Walls Cozumel in 2019. It centers on the critically endangered Cozumel raccoon. A landfill is reflected in the animal’s eye, one side of its face dissolves into paint, and a cruise ship hides among the splatters. The mural takes on habitat loss, plastic pollution, mass tourism and coastal development.
In Roturas, Spain, the Chilean artist Jotapé painted a stream of water that seems to pour from a real window into a woman’s hands. Ofrenda por el agua, from 2023, is described by the artist on the Muro Crítico page as an offering, and he ties it to the privatization of water and other natural resources in Chile.
Across Rue Laennec in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France, Li-Hill, James Bullough and ONUR painted On the Horizon for the 2021 Street Art Boulogne-sur-Mer festival. One wall shows a fisherman. The wall opposite shows sunlight over a shoal of fish. Anyone in the street stands between two ecological futures.
Ice, fire and protest
On September 2, 2009, WWF Germany presented 1,000 figures from Néle Azevedo’s Minimum Monument at Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin. The installation, staged to draw attention to Arctic warming, began as an anti-monument honoring anonymous people instead of heroes. The ice figures started melting within 30 minutes.
David Popa went the other way with ice. His first charcoal-on-ice portrait, later titled Mirage, cracked the floe halfway through. He kept going and photographed the result from above. The experiment led to his Fractured series on ice floes in southern Finland.
The least conventional entry is a slogan, not a painting. During the 2022 Make Amazon Pay day of action in Berlin, activists projected “The Wrong Amazon Is Burning” onto the unfinished EDGE East Side tower beside Warschauer Straße. The building was then planned as Amazon’s Berlin office.
Quieter pieces
Not everything here is a warning. Ahmad Yasin painted acrylic scenes in 2016 on living prickly pear pads in his home garden in Aseera Ashmaliya, near Nablus in the West Bank. Mothers and newborns appear among the spines. Yasin said the wider series was meant to offer hope rather than despair.
CYFI’s Butterfly Effect, painted in 2023 for The Wycliff in St. Paul, Minnesota, is a 20-by-20-foot aerosol mural. Deep shadows lift an orange monarch, a blue butterfly and a lime-green one off the brick at 2327 Wycliff Street.
In Swindon, Curtis Hylton put a hummingbird and a bee among oversized yellow-orange blooms on a gable at 31 Stanley Street for Swindon Paint Fest 2023. In Yekaterinburg, Fruktyvrukty fixed two paper ballerinas above real shelf fungi growing from a tree, so the mushrooms became their skirts. The piece was made for the Carte Blanche festival in 2018. Small, simple and easy to miss.
OXYD painted La Contemplación at the Rainforest Awareness Rescue and Education Center, a licensed wildlife rescue near Iquitos, Peru, at kilometer 47 of the Iquitos-Nauta road. A human profile merges with Amazonian animals and plants. And in Brighton, Jussi TwoSeven showed one wolf at five points in its stride across five monochrome walls for the 2018 Brighton Fringe. Together they formed a city-scale animation. The wolf in the roundup sits high above 40 Middle Street.
