Why This Week's Murals & Music Festival Might Be the Last One in Carson City for a While

"There's only so many walls," Brewery Arts Center Executive Director Spike McGuire told the Nevada Appeal this month, explaining why the festival that has repainted downtown Carson City for four straight Septembers is taking a break after this one. If you have been meaning to walk the mural trail "next year," this is the year that plan runs out.

The fourth annual Murals & Music Festival runs September 15 through 19, bringing 15 artists from around the world to paint 15 new works across the city. That sounds like business as usual for an event now in its fourth year. It isn't. McGuire has said this will be the festival's last outing for a while, not because interest has faded but because the organizers are running out of blank walls to give artists. That single fact changes what this week actually is for anyone who lives here: not another annual art walk to catch whenever, but the closing chapter of a specific four-year project.

How Carson City Ran Out of Walls

The math tells the story better than any adjective could. The inaugural 2023 festival brought roughly two dozen artists together to paint the first murals downtown. The 2024 event added 19 more. By the time this year's 15 new pieces go up, the festival will have put more than 85 murals on Carson City buildings in four years, including the 73 already standing from the first three.

That is not a slow accumulation of public art. That is a city running through its inventory of paintable surfaces fast enough that the people running the program are choosing to stop rather than keep scaling. McGuire has said the Brewery Arts Center plans to shift toward other kinds of public art for a while rather than force a fifth round of murals onto whatever wall space is left. For residents, that reframes this week from "check out the new murals" to "this is the version of downtown Carson City you'll be looking at for the foreseeable future."

Who's Painting, and Where the New Work Is Going

Organizers have made a point every year of bringing in at least three international artists alongside a strong Nevada contingent, and this year keeps that pattern. The international and out-of-state lineup includes Heesco from Australia, Jokin Sortwo and Lara Hurtado from Spain, Prism A.G. from Mexico, Bill Louis from Utah, and Rafael Blanco from Texas. The Nevada side includes Carson City-based artists Alex Kaskie and Andrew Doiron, along with Anthony Ortega, Bryce Chisholm, Doomed Movement, Erik Burke, Hayley Meadows, J Charboneau, and Joe C. Rock.

One project worth watching in particular: Erik Burke is expanding an existing mural at the Brewery Arts Center annex from a small wall panel into a full exterior piece. It is the kind of detail that shows what four years of this festival has actually done to the city's relationship with its own buildings. A mural that once fit modestly on one section of a wall is being redone at a scale that claims the whole building, because the appetite for it is there and, per McGuire, this may be one of the last chances to do it.

The Brewery Arts Center asks building owners to keep murals in place for at least three years, though McGuire is candid that the art is temporary by nature. Buildings get remodeled. Walls weather. Some of the 2023 pieces may not look the same in another few years, which is one more reason this week's map represents the collection close to its peak rather than a snapshot that will look the same indefinitely.

The Week, Day by Day

Almost everything is free except one ticketed concert. Here is what's actually on the calendar:

• Tuesday, September 15, 6 p.m. Artist Rafael Blanco gives a talk called "Ditching the Studio," on stepping away from traditional studio work into public, unpredictable spaces. At the Brewery Arts Center.
• Wednesday, September 16, 6 p.m. A Welcoming Reception with music from Luca from Rome and Jimmy Rossi. Muralists will be on hand to meet the community before they start painting in earnest.
• Friday, September 18, 7 p.m. Loud As Folk presents Taylor Kingman and Stoneteenth in the Performance Hall. This is the one paid event of the week, at $25.
• Saturday, September 19. Two guided walking tours, at 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., led by Visit Carson City's Arts and Culture Program Manager Eric Brooks, who will walk attendees through the new locations and talk about how the murals get placed. The week closes that evening with a screening of "Exit Through the Gift Shop," the documentary on Banksy, presented by the Carson City Classic Cinema Collective.

Throughout the five days, artists will be working in public during daylight hours, and McGuire has specifically encouraged people to get out and watch rather than wait for the finished product. Watching a mural get built in real time, wet paint and all, is a different experience than seeing it finished a week later.

Why This Year's Map Is the One to Keep

Maps showing this year's new locations layered onto the existing collection are available at the Brewery Arts Center at 449 W. King Street and at the Visit Carson City Visitors Center at 716 N. Carson Street, Suite A. Locals have described finding all the murals as something close to a scavenger hunt, and that framing holds up. There is no single corridor where everything lives. The murals are scattered across downtown and beyond, which means the map is doing real work, not just decorating a brochure.

Given what McGuire has said about this being a pause rather than a permanent end, this year's printed map is arguably the first complete document of the whole four-year project rather than just an update to last year's. If the festival doesn't return next September, this is the map that shows the city at the point where the organizers decided they had covered enough wall space for now.

McGuire's read on why any of this matters day to day is straightforward. He has said the point of the murals is that they show up as part of ordinary life, not just for people who go looking for art. A commute past a wall that used to be blank and is now something someone spent a week painting changes what that street feels like, even if you never stop the car.

That is really the case for treating this week as more than a one-off festival write-up. Carson City spent four years deciding, one wall at a time, what it wanted its own streets to look like. This week is when that decision gets its final additions before the city pauses to consider what comes next. Walking a few blocks downtown between now and Saturday means seeing that decision while the paint is still fresh, literally in some cases, on walls that will be part of the everyday backdrop here for years.

If you're already picturing which Carson City block you'd want to live near this fall, or you're weighing what a neighborhood like this looks like for a move, that's a conversation worth having with someone who knows these streets as well as the mural map does. Nicole Kastens has spent her career in Northern Nevada real estate watching towns like this one grow into themselves. Let's Connect if you want a local's read on what's next for Carson City, murals and all.