Welcome to the Pueblo Levee Mural Project home page and galleries. 

Pueblo Levee Mural Project became "The Largest Outdoor Mural Gallery in the World" in the Guinness World Book of Records from 1995-2016. We had the world record for over 20 years.  These murals spanned the concrete levee wall along the Historic Arkansas River, in Pueblo Colorado. The levee wall was built after the Great Pueblo 1921 Flood that left downtown Pueblo under 25 ft. of water. The river waters were diverted to the present location, and this 65 ft. tall concrete wall was built to protect the city from future large floods.  Our record was 200,000 sq. ft.

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 Currently, 2020-2023 Creating the New Levee Murals

    After the removal of all of the historic murals along the levee.  The Pueblo Levee Mural Project regrouped with the Pueblo Conservancy District to start over on the new concrete wall. Cynthia Ramu the Pueblo Levee Mural Project, Muralist/Coordinator since 1992 partnered with the Conservancy District to put new guidelines, mural submissions process, and collaborate on getting new murals on the Pueblo Levee wall in fall 2021.  The new wall is 30 feet tall on a 40-degree slope so we can walk or repell as we paint on the murals.  We have been painting year-round adding new murals each month. (The original wall was over 60 feet tall at a 45-degree angle)

      To date, we are still working on breaking the US Record and the world record for the "Longest Outdoor Mural in the World" which is held by S. Korea.  We have over 100 muralists that have painted murals with us. Our current measures at 1015,000 sq. ft. and our goal is the paint 2700,000 to break the world record.  

 

 

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The Pueblo Levee Mural's Story

In 1978 a group of USC/CSU-Pueblo students and local artists known as the TEE HEE’s band together to start one of the first organized murals to be painted on the levee wall.  But at this time it was illegal to paint there so they had to do it late at night.  So this is where the "Fish in the Bathtub" on the 4th Street Bridge was born.  The students spent months planning how to carry the paint, work in the dark with flashlights, and also have lookouts in case the police came.  Some of the neighbors saw their flashlights and heard them whistle to each other and the police made an attempt to catch the students.  But just as they finished the fish they made their escape on one of the trains heading east and jumped off at the Union Depot ran down Union Ave and found shelter at the Branch Inn with Joey the owner.  He was just closing the bar down and letting them sleep behind the bar for the night. This quickly became an issue of whether the painting on the levee should be legal or not.  At that time our current District Attorney Gus Sandstrom was running for District Attorney and proposed that painting should become legal with a permit. 

          In 1979 a local artist Dave Roberts early organizer of the Levee Murals created a yearly Paint-A-Thon during May for any artists that come to paint the levee and he would supply all of the paint.  Roberts would go to paint stores around southern Colorado and take all of their old latex paint and recycle it by painting on the levee.  In the early 1990s, Roberts became the major paint recycler for Colorado, and still to this day Southern Colorado Recycling works sorting paint, donating to the levee artists, and recycling in Pueblo.

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   Be sure to follow us on social media at https://www.facebook.com/PuebloLeveeMuralProject

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