Concrete Creativity: Historic Murals of the Pueblo Levee

In 1978 a group of USC/CSU-Pueblo students and local artists known as the TEE HEE’s banned together to start one of the first organized murals to be painted on the levee wall.  At this time, it was illegal to paint on the levee, so they had to do it late at night. This is where the "Fish in the Bathtub" on the 4th Street Bridge was born. The students spent months planning how to carry the paint, work in the dark with flashlights, and have lookouts in case the police came.  Some of the neighbors saw their flashlights and heard them whistle to each other and called the police. The police made an attempt to catch the students. However, the students finished the fish and made their escape on one of the trains heading east then jumped off at the Union Depot and ran down Union Ave. 

They found shelter at the Branch Inn.  Joey, the owner, was just closing the bar down and decided to let them sleep behind the bar for the night. Whether painting on the levee should be legal or not quickly became an issue.  At that time, the current District Attorney Gus Sandstrom, proposed that painting should become legal with a permit.  

In 1979, a local artist Dave Roberts, an early organizer of the Levee Murals, created a yearly Paint-A-Thon during May for any artists that wanted to paint the levee and he supplied all of the paint. Roberts would go to paint stores around southern Colorado and take their old latex paint and recycle it by using it to paint on the levee. In the early 1990s, Roberts became the major paint recycler for Colorado, and still to this day Southern Colorado Recycling works sorting paint, donating to the levee artists, and recycling in Pueblo. 

Pueblo Levee Mural Project became "The Largest Outdoor Mural Gallery in the World" in the Guinness World Book of Records from 1995-2016.  These murals spanned the concrete levee wall along the Historic Arkansas River, in Pueblo Colorado. The Pueblo Levee Mural stopped being the longest mural world record due to extensive   repairs needed on the levee wall.  Built in 1921 after the flood that left downtown Pueblo under 25 ft. of water.  The river was diverted to the present location, and this 65 ft. concrete wall was built to protect the city from future large floods.  

Currently, Pueblo artists have two records they're targeting: breaking Pueblo's own record of 200,000 square feet of mural that stood between 1995 and 2018, and surpassing the 170,000 square-foot mural in Wichita, Kansas that last year set a record as the largest in the U.S. 

This exhibit honors all the many muralists that have worked on the levee throughout its existence, often without any acknowledgment. Cynthia Ramu has been a staunch advocate for many years, advocating to the local government, preserving the legacy, helping get the word out to new artists and mentoring the new artists in safety and best practices. Managed by the Pueblo Conservancy District, we hope to see the Guiness World Record back in Pueblo soon.