Helping cities extend the life of their mural collections
Paint is made of pigment and binder. Sun and weather wear down the binder first, so in most faded murals the color is still on the wall, looking gone long before it actually is.
Whether a mural is freshly painted or showing years of wear, we stabilize and protect it without repainting or changing a single brushstroke.
Most cities budget $0 for mural preservation once the ribbon is cut.
See what that costs →
Anemos was founded by Jhonattan Arango of Art of Anón, a public mural practice whose 600-square-foot mural sculpture The Offering entered the City of Dallas Permanent Public Art Collection under a projected twenty-year lifespan. More than a decade of painting in every kind of climate showed a similar pattern: good paintings on good walls losing density, contrast, and color on a predictable timeline, in partnership with coating manufacturers whose products are low-VOC, LEED compliant, and built specifically for fine art mural preservation.
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Paint is pigment held in a binder. When the binder fails the color appears to fade, but the pigment is usually still there. This understanding changes everything.
Cities commission murals, artists paint them, and when it goes up it's celebrated and photographed. Then the system stops because there usually isn't a maintenance schedule, inspection cycle, and nobody watching the paint age. By the time a mural looks faded most people assume it's gone, but usually the pigment is still sitting under a failed binder caused by everything the environment throws at it. Unfortunately, without a path forward, cities repaint and the original work is lost.
In 2017, a city in Palm Beach County, Florida commissioned a six-figure legacy large-scale mural by a world-class artist. Six years later, environmental damage had set in and someone had tagged the lower portion. The city reached out to the artist, who quoted a six-figure repair. Not able to afford it, they commissioned another artist and painted it over instead.
Less than ten years later, they had spent significantly more than the original six-figure investment, and were left with a replacement of something they never wanted to replace. The one thing they changed the second time around was adding a protective coat to the new mural, the very step that could have saved the first.
A city commissions a 40′ × 30′ legacy mural for $160,000. Six years later the binder is failing and the color begins to read flat. On inspection, the city finds there's no topcoat on the mural. With this in mind, let's talk about the four paths, all of them occurring before the ten-year mark.
Commission figures are illustrative. Preservation is scoped per wall, by size, condition, access, and number of murals treated.
Preservation is priced like maintenance,
not like a new commission. What a relief.
These scenarios are the default timeline. Every mural eventually needs attention; the only variables are when and what's left to work with by then. The earlier a collection is assessed, the more options remain.
Municipalities·Mural festivals·Universities·Corporate collections·Developers·Nonprofits & institutions
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