Paint the Town Bull: A Self-Guided Walking Tour of Durham’s Best Murals and Street Art
From Brightleaf Square to Golden Belt, here’s your insider route through the Bull City’s most vibrant outdoor gallery
Durham doesn’t do subtle. This is a city that turned its abandoned tobacco warehouses into art campuses, its boarded-up storefronts into canvases for Black artists, and its downtown sidewalks into a mile-long open-air museum. If you’ve spent any time in the Bull City, you already know the murals are everywhere — splashed across parking garages, peeking out from alleys, wrapping entire buildings in color. But if you want to see the best of it without wandering aimlessly (though wandering aimlessly in Durham is never a bad idea), this walking tour connects the dots between the Brightleaf and Golden Belt districts, with plenty of worthy detours in between.
Budget about two hours if you like to linger, ninety minutes if you’re efficient. Wear comfortable shoes. Bring a charged phone — you’re going to want photos. And maybe grab a coffee at one of the dozen spots along the way, because this is Durham, and nobody’s in a hurry.
Starting Point: Brightleaf Square and the Words That Stop You in Your Tracks
Begin your walk at Brightleaf Square, the pair of beautifully restored turn-of-the-century tobacco warehouses at the intersection of Main Street and Duke Street. Brightleaf is on the National Register of Historic Places, and it’s worth a moment to appreciate the architecture before you start hunting for paint on walls. The old brick, the iron details, the wide interior walkways — this place has been shops and restaurants for decades now, but it still feels like a working factory town dressed up for a night out.
Your first major stop is right here. On the Brightleaf building at Peabody Place, at the corner of Main and Duke, you’ll find the mural that has quietly become one of Durham’s most meaningful public artworks: “Life is so beautiful. Life is so hard.” The words belong to Kate Bowler, a Duke Divinity School professor who was diagnosed with stage IV cancer in her thirties and wrote about it with devastating honesty in her bestselling memoir Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved. The mural was painted with help from Chapel Hill muralist Loren Pease, and since it went up it has become a genuine pilgrimage site — people leave flowers, notes, and personal tokens at its base. It’s not flashy. It’s not Instagram bait. It’s just true, and that’s what makes it hit so hard. Stand here for a minute. Read it twice. You’ll carry it with you the rest of the day.
Heading Down Main Street: History on the Walls
Walk east along Main Street and you’ll start picking up murals quickly. At 119 East Main Street, look for “Here Comes the Sun” by Karen (Stern) Perkins, a bright, optimistic piece that contrasts nicely with the heavier emotional weight of the Bowler mural you just left behind.
Continue east and keep your eyes on the corner of Main Street and Corcoran Street, where you’ll find the Baba Chuck Davis tribute mural by the Durham Mural Crew. If you didn’t know Chuck Davis, here’s the short version: he was one of the pioneers of traditional African dance in America, founded the African American Dance Ensemble right here in Durham in 1983, and was a beloved figure around town — the kind of person you’d see strolling through downtown in colorful West African clothing, radiating peace and joy. The mural captures that spirit. It’s a love letter from Durham to one of its cultural heroes, and it’s a piece that rewards a close look at the details.
The American Tobacco Campus: Bees, Crosswalks, and Bronze Bulls
From Main Street, cut south toward the American Tobacco Campus, the massive redevelopment of the old American Tobacco Company factory along Blackwell Street. This is one of Durham’s signature destinations, and it holds some of the best public art in the city.
On the west wall of the Burt’s Bees headquarters (housed in the historic Hill Building on campus), you’ll find “The Swarm” by Matthew Willey, founder of The Good of the Hive initiative. Willey has committed to hand-painting 50,000 individual honey bees in murals around the world — the number found in a single healthy hive — and this piece was one of his signature works. Created for Burt’s Bees’ annual Culture Day in honor of the company’s late founder Burt Shavitz, the mural depicts a swarm in motion, symbolizing new beginnings and the way Shavitz himself first stumbled upon beekeeping. Four hundred Burt’s Bees employees, from factory workers to the general manager, each painted a petal of one of the surrounding flowers. It’s collaborative art at its most meaningful, and the scale of it on that old brick wall is genuinely stunning.
While you’re on campus, look down. The “Snapping!, Crackling!, Popping!” crosswalks at the intersection of Blackwell and Vivian Streets were designed by local artist Mary Carter Taub. They’re playful, colorful, and easy to miss if you’re not paying attention — which is exactly why I’m telling you to look down. Taub’s crosswalk designs also appear at Durham Central Park at the Foster Street crossing, so keep an eye out for those later in your walk.
Before you leave the area, swing by City Center Plaza to see “Major the Bull”, the iconic bronze sculpture by Michael Waller and Leah Foushee. Major was cast entirely in Durham at Liberty Arts, a local studio and foundry, and was gifted to the city through a grant from Central Carolina Bank. It’s the Bull City’s bull, and it’s a proper photo op.
Foster Street and the Pauli Murray Legacy
Head north up Foster Street and you’ll arrive at one of Durham’s most important pieces of public art: the “Pauli Murray and True Community” mural at 313 Foster Street. This twelve-foot-high, rainbow-hued portrait of Murray was created as part of the Face Up: Telling Stories of Community Life project, led by artist Brett Cook between 2007 and 2009. If you don’t know Pauli Murray, you should — they were a Durham native, civil rights activist, lawyer, poet, Episcopal priest, and one of the most important (and under-recognized) figures in American history. The mural was pieced together by hundreds of community members from Duke and Durham, and the surrounding text includes quotes about Murray from local residents, historians, and family members. The Face Up project produced fourteen permanent public monuments across Durham, with more than 1,500 people participating, but this one at 313 Foster is the centerpiece.
Nearby on Foster Street, at the Downtown Durham YMCA (218 W. Morgan Street), find “Time Bridge” by internationally recognized artist Odili Donald Odita. Commissioned by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University to celebrate its tenth anniversary in 2015, this large-scale abstract mural uses bold geometric patterns and vivid color to represent Durham’s diversity. Odita described being inspired by Durham as a place with an awareness of complexity — a city that lets its many different interests thrive together. The painting is unmistakably his style: hard-edged, rhythmic, almost musical in its color relationships. It’s one of the more sophisticated pieces of public art in the city, and it rewards repeated visits.
Chapel Hill Street Detour: The Garage and the Wall of Hope
If you have time, loop over to Chapel Hill Street for a couple more stops. At 198 East Chapel Hill Street, the Durham Convention Center Garage features door murals painted by Cornelio Campos and Cecilia Lueza — bright, graphic works that transform an otherwise forgettable parking structure into something worth noticing.
A few blocks west, at 136 East Chapel Hill Street, the “Wall of Hope” by Andria Linn was painted for Threshold Clubhouse, a community mental health organization. It’s a quieter, more contemplative piece, and it speaks to the way Durham uses its walls not just for decoration but for genuine community expression.
Further out on Chapel Hill Street, you can find additional Pauli Murray murals by Brett Cook, including “Pauli Murray Roots and Soul” at 1101 West Chapel Hill and “Pauli Murray and the Virgin de Guadalupe” at 2009 Chapel Hill Street, extending the Face Up project’s reach well beyond downtown.
Golden Belt: The Art Campus at the End of the Road
From downtown, it’s about a one-mile walk east along Main Street and then south on Taylor Street to the Golden Belt Campus at 800 Taylor Street. It’s an easy walk, and the destination is worth every step.
Golden Belt is a former textile mill that has been converted into Durham’s premier arts campus. The original brick buildings house 25 working artist studios in the Warehouse Building, the ROOM100 Gallery (programmed by the Durham Art Guild, exhibiting regional and local artists), a rotating gallery in Mill No. 1, and an artist residency program. The Durham Art Guild’s gallery space is open Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Sundays from noon to 6 p.m., so you can walk right in.
Golden Belt’s art isn’t limited to what’s inside the galleries. The campus itself — the courtyards, the loading docks, the spaces between buildings — serves as an evolving canvas. Outdoor installations and temporary works rotate regularly, and the artists who studio here often display work in the common areas. It’s the kind of place where you turn a corner and find something unexpected leaning against a brick wall.
The best time to visit Golden Belt is during Third Friday, Durham’s monthly art walk held the third Friday of each month from 6 to 9 p.m. The event stretches from Brightleaf Square all the way to Golden Belt, and it’s free. Studios open their doors, galleries host receptions, and the whole corridor between downtown and the campus comes alive. If you can time your walking tour to a Third Friday evening, do it — you’ll see everything on this route in a completely different light, and you’ll meet the artists themselves.
The Bigger Picture: Durham’s Living Walls
What makes Durham’s mural scene different from, say, a curated mural festival in a bigger city is that these pieces grew organically from the community. The NorthStar Church of the Arts mural project is a perfect example: when businesses boarded up their storefronts during the social upheaval of 2020, NorthStar and Art Ain’t Innocent organized 23 local Black artists to paint 24 murals on the plywood. Artists like Kennedi Carter, John Vance, Asha David, Megan Bowser, and Shante Stewart were given creative freedom and equitable compensation, and the results were raw, powerful, and deeply personal. Many of those murals were later relocated near the 9th Street Bakery for a continued installation. That’s Durham in a nutshell — nothing stays boarded up for long, and even the plywood gets turned into something beautiful.
You can pick up a Mural Durham Finder at the Visitor Info Center downtown for a printed guide and map, or check the City of Durham’s Public Art Map online for a comprehensive, interactive catalog of every piece in the collection.
But the real guide is your own two feet and a willingness to look up, look down, and look around corners. Durham’s walls are always talking. All you have to do is walk slowly enough to listen.
Total walking distance: approximately 2.5 miles one-way from Brightleaf Square to Golden Belt. Allow 90 minutes to 2 hours depending on pace and stops. Free parking is available near Brightleaf Square and at Golden Belt Campus. Third Friday art walks run monthly, 6–9 p.m., and are free to attend.