The full wall in July 2021, before the 2022 and 2024 repaints. Photo by A Yee, via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.
In 1973 three UT art students talked the University Co-op into buying them paint for a free mural. For fifty years they kept coming back to repaint it — adding whoever Austin had become since, and quietly painting out whoever it forgot.
Its name is Austintatious, after a comic book Kerry Awn, Rick Turner and Tommy Bee (Tom Bauman) had planned as roommates. They started on the Co-op’s north wall, on 23rd Street just off Guadalupe — the Drag — in 1973 and finished in February 1974. The Co-op’s board didn’t want a mural until the trio offered to paint it for nothing; the store later bought it for $1,000 and still owns the wall. The Austin Chronicle calls it the city’s first mural.
The composition is a fisheye view of Austin: a skyline bent around a blue sky, the Capitol on one side, the UT Tower on the other, and in the middle Stephen F. Austin, copied from Elisabet Ney’s statue at the Capitol. Bauman painted him holding a scroll. Then Jim Franklin — the artist most responsible for making the armadillo Austin’s mascot — came by, painted clouds over his jacket and turned the scroll into armadillos. “It was the right thing to do,” Bauman says. Around him sit the 1970s Drag: Johnny Winter peering from a window of the Vulcan Gas Company, the comic-book governor candidate Oat Willie, the Salvation Sandwiches kiosk, and the Smile Guy, who shook a bucket for the People’s Free Clinic in the church basement over your right shoulder as you face the wall.
The artists came back in 1982, 2002, 2014 and 2022, and again in April 2024 after a tagger scrawled five-foot letters across the middle. Each visit adds and subtracts. Hank Hill arrived on his riding mower in 2002 (“Hank is easy to paint,” says Awn), and the original 1974 streaker became Matthew McConaughey with his bongos. Bauman painted in his son as a 12-year-old Boy Scout on the Capitol steps; Barbara Jordan and Ann Richards now peer out of Capitol windows, and 2022 also brought an Austin FC ball and a masked figure. In 2014 they peeled back the upper-left corner like a page to reveal South Congress — the Broken Spoke, the Continental Club, Matt’s El Rancho. A painted postmark in the top-right corner logs the dates. “We reserve the right to subtract as well,” Bauman says.
The link above goes to the second layer. In 2023 filmmaker Mike Woolf of Beef & Pie Productions and the studio The Graphic Standard put a high-resolution copy of the wall online. Click a figure and a short film opens: Willie Nelson, Stevie Ray Vaughan, the Guacamole Queen, a moon-tower mystery. The credits admit, cheerfully, that the filmmakers “didn’t even attempt to verify the memories of their sources” and simply “printed the legend.” Watch them as oral history, not as a record.
The limits are physical. The mural is painted on stucco — “the wall is just chicken wire,” Awn told the Alcalde — and it has been tagged repeatedly, most recently in 2025. The artists are now in their mid-70s, living in Alpine, Driftwood and New York; Woolf says they called the 2024 repaint their last, and the Co-op has talked about finding others to take over repairs. Closer to hand: this summer the pavement in front was fenced off while a McDonald’s went up next door. The restaurant opened on 21 September, so the wall should be back in reach, but check before you go. Otherwise the wall is outdoors and free — and for the films, you don’t need to go at all.