America Made Me Look Twice (18 Photos)

October 12, 2026

By Vidar

Art That Could Only Happen in America

Days after the 2021 inauguration, Bernie Sanders and his mittens were sitting on a wall in Los Angeles. In Houston a cowboy dips his partner in front of the Lone Star, and in Little Rock a robot leans out of a real window to reach for a frog. Eighteen works on American walls, from icons the whole country knows by heart to kids swimming up a building in Lynn.

More: Street Art Americans Will Recognize in One Second (14 Photos)

🧤 Bernie’s Mittens — By Jonas Never in Los Angeles, California, USA 🇺🇸

Bernie Sanders in a parka, face mask and oversized mittens, legs crossed on a folding chair, painted around a utility door in Mar Vista. Jonas Never painted it after the inauguration photo turned into a meme and added one line in script: “Cause U Love The Mittens.”

💡 Mitten Fact: The mittens came from Vermont. Second-grade teacher Jen Ellis made them from repurposed wool back in 2016, when she was making presents for her daughter’s teachers.

More: Bernie Sanders Meme in Los Angeles (3 Photos)

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🤠 “The Texas Kiss” — By Eduardo Kobra in Houston, Texas, USA 🇺🇸

The 1945 V-J Day kiss from Times Square, moved to Texas: cowboy hat, bandana, fringe and boots, with the Lone Star behind the couple. The downtown Houston wall covers about 1,000 square meters, and Kobra said he meant the kiss as a wish for unity and peace, not a political statement.

💡 Nerd Fact: The wall is part of Big Art. Bigger Change., a Houston series of 58 large-scale murals curated by Street Art for Mankind.

More: 19 Murals by Eduardo Kobra

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📷 Photo by Charles Holt.

💪 Popeye Pipes — By Tom Bob in New Bedford, Massachusetts, USA 🇺🇸

Before: a green wall with gas meters and a few pipes. After: Popeye flexes beside a can of spinach, the pipes sprout red leaves and the meters have eyes. Tom Bob grew up in New Bedford before moving to New York, and his own post tags this wall there.

💡 Nerd Fact: Popeye was a late arrival. He first appeared in 1929 in E.C. Segar’s Thimble Theater, a strip that had run since 1919 around Olive Oyl.

More: Street Art by Tom Bob – Collection 2 (31 Photos)

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🤖 Robot With a Frog — By Jason Jones in Little Rock, Arkansas, USA 🇺🇸

A gray robot with a flashlight for a head leans out of a real window, a flower sprouting from the top, and holds out one long finger to a small green frog. Mushrooms, flowers and a butterfly fill the wall below. Jones lives in Fayetteville, and back in 2019 he had already painted more than 100 murals in Northwest Arkansas.

💡 Bot Fact: Robots turn up all through his work. His portfolio includes a Strawberry Bot, a Tomato Bot, a Carrot Bot and a Firefly Bot.

More: Made It Funny Again (10 Photos)

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🐊 Alligator Wall — By ROA in Atlanta, Georgia, USA 🇺🇸

A gator the length of the building, belly-up with its claws in the air, painted in ROA’s usual black and white. Southern Spaces places it on the east side of 209 Mitchell Street, facing Forsyth Street, right under the old Star Hotel sign.

More: ROA – A Street Art Collection

🎩 “Lincoln” — By Eduardo Kobra in Lexington, Kentucky, USA 🇺🇸

The seated Lincoln from the Lincoln Memorial, repainted in kaleidoscope colors on the back of the Kentucky Theatre. The mural is 60 feet high and went up in 2013.

💡 Nerd Fact: The statue Kobra borrowed is not one block of stone. It was carved from 28 separate pieces of Georgia marble, fitted together almost seamlessly.

More: Abraham Lincoln by Eduardo Kobra in Kentucky

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🏊 “Stay Cool Logan” — By Bryan Beyung in Lynn, Massachusetts, USA 🇺🇸

Kids float, wave and swim their way up a turquoise building, with the real windows sitting in the water. In his post about the mural, Beyung says it is about the lightness of childhood: growing up, playing and making memories. It was made through Beyond Walls’ Classroom to the Streets program, where students, teachers and artists design murals together.

💡 School Fact: The wall keeps teaching after it is finished. Each mural sparks lesson plans built around subjects such as visual arts, social studies, English and science.

More: Still a Kid (14 Photos)

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🛑 “Stop Making Stupid People Famous” — By Plastic Jesus in Los Angeles, California, USA 🇺🇸

Five red words on a gray utility pillar, in the city that makes people famous for a living. Plastic Jesus is a Los Angeles street artist whose wall pieces often move on to prints and canvases, and this line went the same way.

More: Plastic Jesus in Los Angeles (6 Photos)

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🚀 “Houston, We Have a Problem…” — By MrDheo in Houston, Texas, USA 🇺🇸

Internet celebrity Hasbulla in a spacesuit, an astronaut planting a flag on the moon behind him, and the line everyone ties to this city written in script on the brick. MrDheo painted it at 1502 Sawyer Street for the Big Walls Big Dreams mural festival.

💡 Space Fact: Nobody on Apollo 13 said “we have a problem.” Jack Swigert radioed “Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here,” and Jim Lovell repeated it, NASA’s account of the 1970 flight shows.

More: “Houston, We Have a Problem” by MrDheo

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🌸 “In the Golden Afternoon” — By Ouizi in Ticonderoga, New York, USA 🇺🇸

Dahlias, sunflowers and small blue flowers cover the whole brick wall, so the doors and windows become gaps in a giant garden. Ouizi took the title from Lewis Carroll’s poem at the start of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and painted it for Walls Between Waters, which brings murals to downtown Ticonderoga.

💡 Alice Fact: The poem looks back on a boat trip on July 4, 1862, when Carroll first came up with the story for three of the Liddell sisters: Lorina, Alice and Edith.

More: Flowers For You (8 Photos)

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🚫 “Follow Your Dreams – Cancelled” — By Banksy in Boston, Massachusetts, USA 🇺🇸

A worn-out painter, the slogan from every graduation speech, and a red stamp across it. Banksy Explained dates it to May 2010, on Essex Street in Chinatown, in the slow years after the 2008 financial crisis.

More: Banksy’s Iconic Street Art: 100 Stunning Photos

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🍬 “Emoji Dispenser” — By Leon Keer in Fayetteville, Arkansas, USA 🇺🇸

A parking deck turned into a gum machine the size of a building, filled with emoji faces instead of gum, with painted cardboard boxes stacked around the corner. The City of Fayetteville calls it a comment on how emotions have become things we buy; Keer painted it on the Town Center deck in summer 2025.

💡 Gum Fact: Penny gum machines started in New York. In 1888 Thomas Adams put Tutti-Frutti gum machines along the city’s elevated train lines: a penny in, a turn, a piece of gum out.

More: This Happens When You Have a Strong Imagination (8 Photos)

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🦇 Fear and Loathing Homage — By HUETEK in New York, USA 🇺🇸

A Las Vegas-style welcome sign with the artist’s name on it, a cactus, bats, and a man in tinted aviators with a cigarette holder, the look Raoul Duke made famous. HUETEK painted this homage to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas on a long wall under a fence of razor wire.

💡 Book Fact: Hunter S. Thompson’s trip first ran in Rolling Stone on November 11, 1971, under a subtitle that could fit this whole post: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream.

More: “We Can’t Stop Here, This Is Bat Country” by HUETEK

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🦋 A Neon Figure Reaches for a Butterfly — By ITSZBITSZ in New York, USA 🇺🇸

A neon green woman holds out one finger to a small butterfly while a see-through wing opens behind her. Scales, vines and a dragon-like headdress wind through the portrait against a dark blue wall.

More: Butterfly Art (15 Photos)

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🥤 “Coca-Cola Molotov” — By Icy and Sot in New York City, USA 🇺🇸

A masked figure holds out a red crate of Coke bottles, and every bottle is on fire. The Iranian-born brothers made it in an abandoned house in New York in January 2014.

💡 Nerd Fact: The drink in the crate was born in Atlanta. Coca-Cola dates its birth to May 8, 1886, and it first went on sale at Jacobs’ Pharmacy, at five cents a glass.

More: Coca-Cola Molotovs by Icy and Sot in New York

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🚂 “Passage Through Ticonderoga” — By Steven Teller in Ticonderoga, New York, USA 🇺🇸

A red steam locomotive, a steamboat and a captain at the wheel, all on one wall. Teller painted it for Walls Between Waters in 2026, working from archive photos of the town’s train and steamboat days.

💡 Rail Fact: Ticonderoga sits between Lake George and Lake Champlain. The Delaware & Hudson’s Baldwin and Ticonderoga branch lines served the steamboats and paper mills here from the late 1800s; freight ended around 1980, but the steamboats still run for tourists.

More: 8 American Murals Worth the Detour

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🍩 Homer Simpson Donut — By Tom Bob in New Bedford, Massachusetts, USA 🇺🇸

Before: a concrete ring around a hole in the grass. After: a pink frosted donut with sprinkles, sized for Homer Simpson. Local station Fun 107 spotted it in the middle of the Buttonwood Park baseball field.

More: Street Art by Tom Bob – Collection 2 (31 Photos)

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🌳 “I Remember When All This Was Trees” — Attributed to Banksy in Detroit, Michigan, USA 🇺🇸

A boy with a bucket of red paint stands in the rubble of the Packard auto plant, next to one sentence. In 2010, Detroit’s 555 Gallery removed the wall from the ruins to save it.

💡 Wall Fact: The saved piece was an 8-foot, 1,500-pound slab of cinder block, and it later sold at auction for $137,500.

More: Banksy’s “I Remember When All This Was Trees”

🔗 Visit Banksy’s official website