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Thirty-two expressive passengers, a few dressed in rubber ducky shirts and nearly all donning white Easter bunny rabbit ears, climbed onto the sold-out Easter day Star Trolley collaboration with St. Petersburg’s annual SHINE Mural Festival.
Each year, SHINE invites 16 artists – four local, four national, four international, and four community “Bright Spots” recipients – to embellish a wall in sunny St. Petersburg.
The Star Trolley Experience shuttles guests around three main art districts in St. Petersburg, complete with murals. Beginning at Bayboro Brewing Company in the Warehouse Arts District, passengers meet their tour guide and shuttle operator before launching into the rich, vivid history of St. Pete’s path to legendary mural status.
On the Easter afternoon segment of the tour, our guide Dan Wood, a sandy-haired, bright blue-eyed lad from England, dove into his history and fascination with street art. Wood discovered his adoration for street art years ago after a move to East London. The vibrant colors adorning Shoreditch’s streets and walls unlatched a new passion, a hankering to appreciate an underappreciated art form (underappreciated at that time, at least).
Wood joked that he lost many significant others due to his fascination with the art medium. He’d embark on trips to New York City, causing the significant other excitement, thinking they’d gallop along to the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty. They expressed heavy dismay when they learned Wood’s itinerary consisted of self-tours of famous street art.
Wood moved to Los Angeles years ago, working for a street art tour company in Venice Beach, California. There, he acquired his expert knowledge and background about each artist and mural style displayed.
During the initial segment of the shuttle tour, we breezed past a few colorful walls (St. Pete has around 600 murals and 180 SHINE pieces, and Wood emphasized the difficulty in assembling a thorough tour) until we landed at the first walking stop.
A bright orange and red sun sets behind a purple mountain. Trains roll through the scenery. Three Chinese men simultaneously lend their time to the Transcontinental Railroad, hoping for a different future. The Path We Came, Chenlin Cai’s gorgeous 2023 mural, stunned every onlooker.
Following Cai’s marvel, we walked over to a monochromatic beauty entitled La Emperatriz by the Mexican artist Paola Delfin. Two female faces gaze out at the horizon, coexisting with flowers and leaves. Marveling at the art style interested every guest, yet Wood’s in-depth storytelling about each mural and artist solidified the tour’s excellence.
Across the street from Delfin’s piece stands a monumental piece by Hoxxoh, an artist from Miami.
Hoxxoh’s piece covered up a previous testament of a Spanish soldier’s face planted in the center of a mural, appearing downtrodden as war and terror raged on around him. Wood expressed that though the mural by English artists Nomad Clan stole hearts, the colors couldn’t keep up with the beating Florida sun. The festival assigned Hoxxoh to cover up the harrowing mural with a different piece.
Hoxxoh chose a blend of blues, blacks and whites for his addition to the 2023 run of SHINE. According to Wood, Hoxxoh specializes in technical artwork, fancying the use of diverse gadgets and generators to achieve a geometric effect.
Hoxxoh splattered lines – thanks to those unique contraptions he assembles – that ornament the background of the black-and-white Florida birds at the forefront of Rainbird.
Throughout the trolley ride, we saw around 50 murals, most backed with crucial information surrounding their birth or an anecdote between Wood and the artist. The discussion surrounding the difference between street art and graffiti and their overlap also made the trolley experience a remarkable one.
Wood confesses that everyone asked that question will have a different response, yet he believes graffiti tends to have a negative connotation, associated with illegal activity or gang affiliation, which can sour a street artist’s reputation.
Street art, on the other hand, refers to commissioned or legal art that might have graffiti backgrounds. He pointed out that a standout part of SHINE is its ability to recognize talent in the street art world, regardless of the chatter surrounding graffiti art.
As the mural tour spotlighted, SHINE is not like other mural festivals. The festival costs $250,000, provides room, board, food and airfare for each participant, and allots $2,000 per artist per mural during the weeklong celebration.
Unbeknownst to most on our tour, other festivals don’t pay anything and muralists donate their work. The muralists possess such fervor for the artform they’ll pay a business to let them make a mural.
Many businesses refuse to allow muralists to paint the front of their buildings. Yet they don’t mind color pops on the back of the building. That nugget of information brought the trolley tour to the 600 block of Central Avenue, the starting point for SHINE nine years ago.
Behind almost every establishment, a mural fills every inch of blank space. From an ecstatic sun to an angry great white shark turning in for a bite to Palehorse’s jaw-dropping depiction of Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of knowledge and music, the 600 block demonstrates the scale of artistic talent prevailing throughout St. Pete.
The tour wrapped back around to the Warehouse District for final remarks and a chance to explore the three murals surrounding Bayboro Brewery.
The trolley operates every Sunday, either once or twice a day, depending on popularity and availability – and spreads wonder and curiosity about the art world in the same fashion as the murals.
As SHINE prepares for its tenth run this October, you can catch up on the murals you missed through a Star Trolley experience.
stpeteartsalliance.org/shine-mural-festival
