Artists have used stone walls as canvases for millennia. Ancient Native Americans created pictographs and petroglyphs on canyon walls and rock faces that documented their lives. These markings are thought to represent hunting practices, spiritual rituals, territorial boundaries, trade routes and celestial maps. Rich windows into societies around the world continue today through the work of contemporary street artists who paint on the walls of urban structures. It is a way for many without opportunity to reclaim public space and explore their cultures. Street artists are working to illuminate urgent issues such as degradation and destruction of the environment, nuclear proliferation and waste, vanishing water, water rights, Native and Indigenous land rights, cultural, racial and gender biases, immigration and the border.

Carlisle and Hamilton will combine and set in motion images from ancient and contemporary wallworks to create a world of gesture, color and content from different eras and cultures, and most importantly, to shine a light on an overlooked thread of southwestern art and contemporary wallworks from around the world.