Living Walls: The Conference That Rewired Atlanta's Relationship With Street Art

Every mural-loving Atlantan owes something to a scrappy 2010 street art conference. Living Walls, The City Speaks was co-founded by Monica Campana and Blacki Migliozzi and first held in Atlanta that year, bringing in street artists and scholars to talk about public space — and to paint a lot of walls while they were at it).

Campana's own path into street art started with guerrilla wheat-pasting around town after moving to Atlanta from Peru as a teenager. In 2008 she and Migliozzi landed a $4,000 grant, threw a festival of muralists, and named the whole thing Living Walls — a name that stuck for the next decade and a half.

Growing pains, and growing up

It wasn't all smooth murals. In 2012, the Georgia Department of Transportation lacquered over a Living Walls piece called "An Allegory" after a permissions miscommunication, and a nude mural by Argentine artist Hyuro was removed after residents complained it was inappropriate). That same year, the festival flipped its lineup to invite only female artists — a deliberate statement in a scene that (like most of the art world) skewed male).

Fifteen years of paint, and the conversation is still going.

By 2017 the group had painted more than 100 murals and hosted 30-plus lectures, and it started expanding beyond intown Atlanta into the Buford Highway corridor, partnering with community group We Love BuHi to make murals a tool for connecting immigrant communities with the neighborhood.

In 2025, Living Walls celebrated its 15th anniversary — a "quinceañero" fundraiser at the Goat Farm Arts Center — with a track record of more than 500 murals across metro Atlanta and an ongoing mission centered on artists of color, women, and LGBTQ+ voices.

And then there's the High

While Living Walls was busy putting art directly onto the street, Atlanta's High Museum of Art was doing the more traditional version indoors — but the two scenes aren't as separate as they sound. Muralists whose careers started on Cabbagetown walls, like Brandon Sadler, have gone on to land pieces in the High's contemporary collection, proof that the wall and the white cube aren't really rivals.