Old Fourth Ward
The Old Fourth Ward — birthplace of Martin Luther King Jr. and home of the Sweet Auburn commercial corridor — is Atlanta's most historically significant neighborhood and the site of the city's most ambitious mural program. The BeltLine's Eastside Trail runs through the district, and the trail's retaining walls and adjacent building faces have attracted national muralists working at a scale and ambition that matches the neighborhood's historical weight. Work here consistently engages with King's legacy, the civil rights movement, and the ongoing tension between historic preservation and rapid development.
Featured Artists
All artists →Tatyana Fazlalizadeh
"Sweet Auburn" honors the commercial corridor that was the economic heart of Black Atlanta through the 20th century — portraits of the business owners, journalists, and community leaders who built the district that produced Martin Luther King Jr. and sustained Black Atlanta through decades of legal segregation, rendered in Fazlalizadeh's monochrome style with text drawn from their own words.
Shepard Fairey
"BeltLine" is Fairey's meditation on the Atlanta BeltLine as a planning intervention — the transformation of a 22-mile railroad corridor into a public greenway that has reshaped every neighborhood it passes through — rendered in Fairey's layered graphic style with portraits of the BeltLine's founders, its critics, and the displaced residents whose communities it has altered.
RIME
"MLK Block" documents the Auburn Avenue block where King was born in 1929 as it appeared in his childhood — the church, the neighbors, the commercial street life of Sweet Auburn at its peak — in RIME's photorealist historical reconstruction style, rendering a vanished streetscape in enough detail to serve as both art and historical record.