Most murals don’t come with an explanation. This one does.

The mural on the backstage door of the Rialto Theatre at 318 E. Congress was painted by Salvador Duran in 2008, and he wrote out exactly what he put there and why. It’s one of the more detailed artist statements in the archive.

The imagery is dense: two winged figures playing cello and violin represent the push and pull between instinct and consciousness; a pianist whose notes escape as birds; a raven for ancestral music and a hawk for Arizona identity; a hummingbird for musicians who have passed on. A skeleton at the center reaches toward a cardinal female figure representing the earth’s reproductive power. Cubist and Futurist influences run through the whole thing. Duran notes it’s best seen from a medium distance — right as you’re walking out onto the stage.

📍 318 E. Congress St · Downtown · 2008

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The corner of N. 6th Ave and E. Pennington has had two lives in the archive. The first mural there — by Gerald Dawavendewa, documented in 2008 — gradually got buried under tagging over the years. By 2016 it was gone, and Luis Gustavo Mena, who has been painting murals in Tucson since the 1970s, painted a new one in its place as part of a series of eight new downtown murals.

Both are now in the database. The predecessor is also in there — check it out — because walls have histories.

📍 N. 6th Ave & E. Pennington St · Downtown · 2016

🔗 Database entry → · Original Tucson Murals Project post →

Do you remember the Dawavendewa mural, or have you walked past the Mena one recently? We’d love to know what’s on that wall today.

On the corner of S. 10th Ave and 27th Street, the Tucson Electric Power substation is wrapped in a full block of mural. It’s been there long enough that a 1994 Tucson Citizen article covered it — and parts of it look that age. The faded figures on the white wall, signed by Miguel A. Zavaleta R. and Marco A. Hernandez, show colonial ships, historical portraits, and an indigenous dancer. On the darker panels, Antonio Pazos Jimenez’s work takes a different direction entirely: a double-headed serpent rendered in mosaic-style stone, and a richly detailed Aztec sun stone floating in a starfield.

Based on the images, it’s hard to envision. Have you been there?

📍 S. 10th Ave & 27th St · South Tucson · Year unknown

🔗 Database entry → · Original Tucson Murals Project post →

On the east wall of the Pizza Hut at 1502 W. St. Marys, there’s a mural. Jerry Peek photographed it in September 2012 — and that’s about all we’ve got. No artist, no background, just the wall.

This is one of dozens of murals in the archive where the record starts and ends with the photo. If you know anything about this one — who painted it, when, or more about what it depicts — we’d love to hear it.

📍 1502 W. St. Marys Rd · 2012 (photo date)

🔗 Database entry → · Original Tucson Murals Project post →

On the side of The Neighborhood DWTN bar at 61 E Congress, there’s a 50-foot mural that’s hard to miss and worth slowing down for. Four artists — Ruben Urrea Moreno, Melo Dominguez, Antonio Lucero, and Gerardo Frias, from both Tucson and Nogales, Sonora — painted it in April 2023 as part of the Rock the Spot mural event.

The Three Sisters refers to the traditional Indigenous practice of growing corn, beans, and squash together — each one supporting the others. The mural takes that idea somewhere cosmic: three women surrounded by corn, monarchs, a bee, water, and a galaxy of sky behind them.

📍 61 E Congress St · Downtown · 2023

🔗 Database entry → · Original Tucson Murals Project post →

Have you seen this one in person? Any details you’d add?

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