The Cobblestone Commons mural really captures the spirit of community. It all started with the annual Cobblestone Live Music & Arts Festival, which has been happening along South Park Avenue for the past three years. Local businesses, known for working closely together, joined forces to create this large and meaningful mural, helping to set the district apart from its usual festivals, sporting events, and concerts that draw in crowds. The collaborations with local businesses and sponsors has resulted in a piece of public art that’s a big win for our community and its neighborhoods.

Scroll through the pages to view the murals and learn about the artists. 

Ellen Rutt is a Detroit-based interdisciplinary artist whose work utilizes an abstract lexicon of layered shapes and primary colors that results in improvisational and evocative installations. She facilitates conversations between materiality and movement, between place and process. Her site-specific installations, mixed-media paintings, and textiles examine notions of belonging and exclusion that expose a divide between nature and culture in the American experience. 

Monet Alyssa is a freelance illustrator born, raised, and currently residing in Buffalo. She is interested in exploring form, pattern, fashion, and nature, and crafts psychedelic and colorful motifs to adorn her figures in works that combine digital and traditional mediums. Alyssa Kifner graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology in 2019, and her work was featured in the 2019 and 2020 editions of the Society of Illustrators Student Scholarship Exhibit and the 2021 Communication Arts Annual.

Miriam Singer was raised in Buffalo and now lives in Philadelphia. Singer uses a combination of printmaking and drawing to create her unique works on paper and designs for public art projects. Selected public artworks include projects for St. Andrews School in Middletown, Delaware (2020), and in Philadelphia, University City Arts League (2019), Navy Yard Transit’s fleet of buses in Philadelphia (2018), and Park Towne Place apartments (2017). Singer currently teaches printmaking at Fleisher Art Memorial in Philadelphia and is a member of the artist collective Space 1026.

Karle Norman is an artist living in Buffalo, New York. Born into a conservative religious group that emphasized strict adherence to the Bible, he used art as an escape. Many hours were poured into his sketchbooks, and sketching remains an integral part of his artmaking some twenty years later. Norman credits his grandmother, an artist herself, with instilling in him the desire to maintain a creative practice. His series “Same Inside” seeks to explore the relationship of our shared experiences to our physical differences.

Morgan Blair is an artist based in Queens. She has painted large-scale murals in Heerlen, The Netherlands; Worcester, Massachusetts; and Montauk and Brooklyn, New York. She also makes hand-cut, artist-edition wooden jigsaw puzzles. Her work has been shown in group and solo exhibitions at galleries such as The Hole, The Journal Gallery, and Kasmin Gallery in New York City; Harper’s Books in East Hampton, New York; and Shane Campbell Gallery and Andrew Rafacz Gallery in Chicago, Illinois.

Quebec-based artist Cyrielle Tremblay builds dream-like worlds where she mixes poetic composition with touches of humor and traces of popular culture. Her creative explorations have led her to work in mediums ranging from mural painting, textiles, and photography to installation, and self-publishing. Tremblay has participated in various festivals and international mural events, and her work has been exhibited in Mexico, Sweden, the United States, France, Colombia, and Canada.

Thomas Evans, aka Detour, is an all-around creative specializing in interactive visuals, portraiture, immersive spaces, creative directing, large-scale public art, often based on photographs of local residents. In his ongoing experiments in visual art, music, and interactive technologies, he expands traditional views of artmaking and challenges the boundaries fine art mediums, all the while reimagining the creative process as grounded in multilayered collaboration and viewer participation.

SALUT is the visual-arts moniker of the Rochester-based artist Bradd Young. Young studied graphic design and studio art in Virginia where he began doing pop-up exhibitions that would eventually lead him to open a studio in Western New York post-graduation. It was then that Young began to develop a color pallet of soft pastels and a style merging his loves of cartoonish surrealism and fine art.

James “Yames” Moffitt is a Buffalo native and co-founder of Pine Apple Company, an artist collective and gallery located in Buffalo’s Allentown neighborhood. Having formally trained at the Pratt Institute, Yames is a multidisciplinary graphic artist who specializes in hand-painted signs, typography, illustration, murals, and more. You can find his work on businesses throughout Buffalo, including Hydraulic Hearth, Sato Brewpub, Larkin Square, and the National Grid Terminal B on Niagara Street. Though this will be Yames’s first mural with the Public Art Initiative, he has assisted on numerous other projects for the Initiative.

Cleveland-based artist Lauren McKenzie creates a vast variety of work that focuses on diversity and bridging the black and white halves of her identity. Originally from West Palm Beach, Florida, the artist spends most of her time either in her studio or working on murals in her community that create conversations around identity, race, and womanhood. Using an array of materials and hues to highlight the beauty of people of color in her life, most of her work features portraits of either individuals she personally knows or are derived from her own imagination as though from a melting pot of faces.

Jason Brammer is a Chicago-based visual artist known for his murals, site-specific installations, distinctive paintings, and mixed-media hand-painted assemblages. Brammer’s murals also veer into fantastic worlds but utilize a more formal trompe l'oeil style that pierces otherwise solid forms and allows viewers to envision a portal to another place. He has received commissions from prominent clients such as LinkedIn, Hulu, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Shedd Aquarium, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the band My Morning Jacket.

Obsidian Bellis is an artist and DIY organizer born and raised on the East Side of Buffalo. After traveling and living in other places on the East Coast and in the Midwest, Bellis now resides on Buffalo’s West Side. Bellis sees her creative drive as a method to bring something new and novel into existence. Finding inspiration from such wide-ranging sources as magical illustrations found in fifteenth to nineteenth–century Coptic prayer scroll amulets and Ethiopian illuminated manuscripts to mythology to Afrofuturism, Bellis’s signature style is a mixture of illustrative and mystical forms often incorporating spectacular natural elements with fantastical figures.

Cobblestone Live Music & Arts Festival takes place in the Historic Cobblestone District in our Downtown with three main outdoor stages & one existing stage in Buffalo Iron Works.

Over the last decade, the Historic Cobblestone District has become a breeding ground for live music and entertainment. Cobblestone Live is a neighborhood of bars, restaurants, and venues coming together to put on a two-day festival which will continue to grow to a national-sized festival in the years to come.