So You Want to Understand St. Pete's Mural Scene

Walk down Central Avenue in St. Petersburg today and you'll run out of neck before you run out of murals. But rewind to 1970, and the local paper was literally photoshopping (well, airbrushing) a mural onto a downtown building just to see what people thought of the idea. The reaction was skepticism.

The wall that started it all

Fast forward to 2012: artists Tes One, the Vitale brothers, and Chris "Palehorse" Parks painted a mural across the back of the State Theatre on Central Ave. It wasn't a festival, it wasn't sanctioned by a grand plan — it was just a wall that got painted. But it lit a fuse. Other artists jumped in on the 600 block, and suddenly a stretch of downtown had new energy nobody had plotted for.

One wall said 'try it.' The whole city said 'yes.'

Tes One started dreaming bigger than a single block. With backing from the St. Petersburg Arts Alliance, a full mural festival took shape, and in 2015 the first SHINE Mural Festival happened. It's produced by the Arts Alliance every year since, and it has been credited with turning "graffiti" skepticism into civic pride.

How big did this get?

Depending on which year you check the count, SHINE has racked up somewhere between roughly 170 and 200 murals across downtown and the surrounding arts districts since 2015 — the St. Petersburg Arts Alliance's own count has crept upward each year as new festivals add work.

Zoom out past just SHINE's tally and the city's public art collection is even bigger: St. Petersburg's official public art collection lists more than 90 pieces on top of the mural count, and SHINE itself is one program within seven distinct, walkable arts districts across the city.

Who runs it, and when does it happen

SHINE is produced by the nonprofit St. Petersburg Arts Alliance and typically runs every October or November (recent editions have run in the fall, with a 2026 edition scheduled for November). Jenee Priebe has directed the festival in recent years, growing community-facing programs like "Bright Spots" that pair professional muralists with neighborhood projects.

It's also, apparently, a tech pioneer: organizers say SHINE was the first mural festival in the world to pair an accessible audio tour with technology (PixelStix) that connects viewers standing in front of a wall straight to online context about the piece — no guesswork required.

Getting oriented before you go

If a couple hundred murals sounds overwhelming, it kind of is, in the best way. Most first-timers start in the Central Arts District, between the 300 and 700 blocks of Central Avenue, because it's dense, walkable, and stacked with murals every few storefronts. From there the scene fans out into the Grand Central District, the Edge District, and the Warehouse Arts District to the south.

You don't need a festival pass or a guide to see any of it — the murals are just... on the walls, year-round, for anyone walking by. That's kind of the point.