South Congress
South Congress Ave is Austin's most photographed street, and its murals are the reason. The "I Love You So Much" declaration painted on the side of Jo's Coffee in 2010 launched a thousand imitations and set off a tourist mural boom that changed the neighborhood — and the city's visual identity — permanently. SoCo's walls carry everything from folk art intimacy to large-format street art ambition, all soaked in that particular warm-tone Austin light.
Featured Artists
All artists →Amy Cook
Austin singer-songwriter Amy Cook spray-painted "I Love You So Much" on the exterior wall of Jo's Coffee on South Congress in 2010 as a spontaneous declaration to her then-girlfriend, musician Kathy McCarty. The pink cursive letters on the white wall have since become Austin's most-photographed location — a folk art gesture that accidentally became a landmark, a symbol of the city's romantic self-image that has outlasted every change around it.
Todd Sanders & Rory Skagen
Austin sign painters who created the "Greetings from Austin" postcard mural in 1998, modeled on the vintage "Greetings from America" linen postcards of the 1940s. Each letter in "AUSTIN" contains a miniature scene of Austin life from that period. The mural has been repainted twice to preserve the original work, and its postcard format has been replicated in dozens of cities — none with quite the same warmth as the original.
South Congress Wall Collective
The "Keep Austin Weird" slogan — originally coined by local business owner Red Wassenich in 2000 — has generated a cottage industry of murals, signs, and painted walls along South Congress. No single artist owns the phrase; it has been painted by dozens of hands across multiple decades, making the SoCo "Keep Austin Weird" walls one of the most genuinely community-created mural environments in American cities.