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A Muralist Unleashed a City in the Middle of a New York Wall

Street artist Logan Hicks’s depicts a dynamic crowd scene in his latest mural entitled 'The Story of My Life.'
Photographs by Tom Ackerman

An architectural landscape photograph laid the blueprint for this intricate new street art mural that just went up on the famed Houston Bowery Wall in Manhattan. Artist Logan Hicks modeled his The Story of My Life mural off a dynamic “crowd scene” picture that he actually staged with his friends and family on Greene Street. Hicks says the mural is symbolic of his past, present, and future in New York City. The crowd portrayed in the painting is representative of the artist’s desire to tell his life’s story through the people that have been apart of it.

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Getting his start as a stencil artist, Hicks gradually builds his compositions layer by layer. He repeatedly spray paints over large cardboard stencils, adding new embellishments with every new layer, and eventually filling out a massive spectral landscape.

Hicks originally started on the wall in late July but had to start over because a heavy rainstorm, combined with scorching summer heat, warped the second 70' layer of the mural. The stencil layer was later recut and Hicks resumed painting the wall mid-August.

The Houston Bowery Wall was made famous during the late 1970s, when Keith Haring painted an original mural on it as a gift to the surrounding neighborhood of lower Manhattan. Since then, the wall has hosted some of the most illustrious muralist working today: Shepard Fairey, Kenny Scharf, and Ron English to name a few. The wall is owned by a company called Goldman Properties, a family run business that has commissioning muralist for decades. Says Jessica Goldman Srebnick, CEO of the company, “His gift of transporting the artistic admirer into a magical urban streetscape is unmatched. His work has the ability to take one to a place of contemplation, curiosity and awe.”

You can check out more by the artist on his website. If you’re interested in the murals that came before, head over to the Goldman Properties website.

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