30 Street Artists Invade Long Beach, Furniture Flies

30 muralists, including Cinta Vidal and Hula, hit the streets last week.

by Francesca Capossela

July 26, 2016, 6:20pm

Cinta Vidal for POW! WOW! Long Beach. All photos by Brandon Shigeta.

A photo posted by POW! WOW! Long Beach (@powwowlongbeach) on Jul 22, 2016 at 1:27pm PDT

Last week, 30 street artists and muralists set up in Long Beach, a longtime hub for arts and music in LA county, to provide the city with a series of colorful and varied urban artworks. Ranging from minimalist designs to playful cartoons to futuristic action pieces, the murals brought color and life to community centers, garages, and bridges. The week-long event was a part of POW! WOW! Long Beach, a festival which originated in Hawaii and has since expanded into a global network, with festivals occurring around the world. The POW! WOW! Festival gets its name from a Native American term which refers to a communal gathering with a focus on art and music. The festival hopes to revive this rich cultural tradition.

One of the most striking murals from POW! WOW! Long Beach comes from street artist HULA. Sean ‘Hula’ Yoro has created a series of intense and vivid water murals, which depict scenes involving water as well as incorporating surrounding bodies of water. His piece for POW! WOW! Long Beach (top of page) depicts a young woman, whose cheek and back are decorated with light blue symbols. The mural is placed on the base of a bridge so that the water seems to obscure the rest of the woman’s body.

On a similarly architectural note, another one of the stunning murals comes from gravity-defying muralist Cinta Vidal. Her M.C Escher-esque pieces make the viewer work to understand their trippy scenes. Vidal’s latest piece, from POW! WOW! Long Beach, depicts furniture apparently falling and floating horizontally across a long wall.

Check out works from POW! WOW! Long Beach below: