Ever Wonder Why Long Beach Has So Many Murals?
Here's the Reason.

If you’ve lived in Long Beach for a while, you’ve probably driven past one of them without thinking much about it.

A giant face painted on the side of a building. A colorful mural under an overpass. A piece of artwork that suddenly appeared on a wall that used to be blank.

A lot of those murals exist because of Long Beach Walls, the annual public art festival that brings artists from around the world to paint throughout the city.

The event used to be known as POW! WOW! Long Beach, a name many longtime residents still recognize. In recent years, it was rebranded as Long Beach Walls and has continued adding new artwork across neighborhoods throughout the city.

Since launching in 2015, the festival has helped create more than 150 murals across Long Beach, turning the city into one of the largest outdoor art galleries in Southern California.

What’s cool about it is that the artwork isn’t tucked away inside a museum. It’s everywhere. Downtown, North Long Beach, Bixby Knolls, the East Village, and plenty of places in between. You might pass the same mural every day on your commute and never realize it was part of a larger citywide project.

Every summer, artists spend a week creating new murals while residents can watch the work happen in real time. By the end of the festival, Long Beach has a few more pieces of public art added to its growing collection.

So if you’ve ever wondered why Long Beach seems to have murals around every corner, now you know.

Want to see them for yourself? Long Beach Walls maintains an interactive map showing mural locations from both recent and past years:

2026 Murals Info: Long Beach Walls Mural Map 2026

Past Mural Locations: Long Beach Walls Past Mural Map