As Laura Hayes made her way from class to class last fall, she sometimes walked past a 14-foot-wide mural, marveling at the colors, patterns and scale of the design on the wall under downtown Atlanta’s Courtland Street viaduct.
This semester, her own work is part of a new mural in the same space. But her contribution to the mural, and work by nearly 200 of her classmates, is getting showcased to an audience that far exceeds the size of the Georgia State University community.
May 2, Georgia State and the developers behind the resurgent South Downtown district unveiled an 80-foot mural featuring the designs of students who’ve contributed over the past two semesters to the public art installation on the university’s Atlanta Campus.
The unveiling, at 80 Forsyth St. SW, about a mile from the heart of the Atlanta Campus, coincided with the district’s College Day celebration and the weekly Smorgasburg Atlanta event, an open-air food market featuring more than 40 vendors. And it was installed just ahead of the FIFA World Cup, which, across an eight-match schedule that starts in June, will bring hundreds of thousands of soccer fans to Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium just blocks away.
“Providing our students with an opportunity to showcase their talent and creativity to a worldwide audience is something we couldn’t pass up,” said L. Jared Abramson, Georgia State’s executive vice president and chief operating officer. “We were delighted to partner with South Downtown because, as Atlanta’s university, creating dynamic, engaging spaces for members of our community is a strategic priority. The mural in South Downtown is directly aligned with that effort.”
The 14-foot mural on the Atlanta Campus, which is replaced each semester, is the collective work of a half-dozen classes of first-year art students taking a course known as Two-Dimensional Design. Part of the “Foundations” group of classes that all incoming art students take, the course is aimed at teaching composition using the elements and principles of design, including shape, pattern and color theory.
Each student creates a 1-inch design, which they then alter and replicate to create a 5-inch motif. The 5-inch motifs created by each of the roughly 20 students in each class are then collectively arranged by the class into a larger, 3- or 4-foot design. The large designs created by the five to seven classes taught each semester are then arranged and hung on the side of Georgia State’s Student Center to form the 14- by 6-foot mural.
The murals are applied to the wall with wheatpaste, an inexpensive, nontoxic and reversible adhesive made from household flour and water.
“I’ve passed by it before, but I didn’t know how it was made,” Hayes, a studio art major, said recently as her classmates applied their work to the mural wall under Courtland Street. “Being a part of this has made me appreciate it even more.”
‘PARTNERS WITH OUR NEIGHBORS’
The campus mural project, known to the university community as “A Pattern Language,” is the basis for the 80-foot mural installed along Southwest Atlanta’s Forsyth Street in the South Downtown neighborhood.
Neill Prewitt, a senior lecturer in Georgia State’s Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design, has an extensive background in producing art installations in public spaces, and directs the school’s Foundations courses.
Using the motifs created by each student in the fall 2025 and spring 2026 Two-Dimensional Design courses, nearly 200 students in all, Prewitt arranged the work to span a space 14 times as big as the campus mural.
Rather than being applied to the building with wheatpaste, the SoDo mural was printed on vinyl and professionally installed by a sign contractor.
And it puts Georgia State students’ artwork on public display for a local, national and international audience just as World Cup soccer matches are set to be held just blocks away this summer.
“We wanted to do something big and attractive, and we wanted to be partners with our neighbors,” Prewitt said of working with South Downtown. “The South Downtown mural is an extension of the campus mural, but we said, ‘Let’s up the ante.’ This is a way for students to feel not only is the university a place for them, but downtown is a place for them, too.”
‘A CONNECTION POINT’
As South Downtown has been reinvigorated with investment, it’s become a hive of activity.
The brainchild of serial entrepreneurs Jon Birdsong and David Cummings, the district encompasses 58 historic Atlanta buildings across 16 acres concentrated along Broad and Mitchell streets, southwest of the Five Points MARTA Station.
The duo began buying up the properties in the district — some derelict, some actively leased — in 2024 with a vision to revitalize the neighborhood with a mix of office, retail and restaurant investment.
With institutions like the Brewhouse Café, Bottlerocket Sushi and El Tesoro set to join Tyde Tate Kitchen, Spiller Park Coffee and the record store Crates along Mitchell Street’s Hotel Row, the district is primed for its closeup when the spotlight of the World Cup brings the world to Atlanta’s doorstep.
Brianna Jackson is the CEO of Heart of South Downtown, a nonprofit organization that helps businesses interested in the neighborhood connect with mentorship, funding and workforce talent, links residents with training and job opportunities, and oversees cultural programming in public spaces with the aim of fostering engagement and pride in the neighborhood.
She said the Georgia State mural gives students a platform while further connecting the neighborhood to the larger community surrounding it.
“There’s something powerful about students seeing their work live in the city. This mural is not just an artistic contribution, it’s a connection point between Georgia State University and the South Downtown community,” Jackson said. “As we prepare for the global spotlight of the World Cup, it’s these kinds of partnerships that define the energy and identity of the neighborhood. It’s also how we continue building a place that reflects the people who shape it.”
As Georgia State and South Downtown collaborate to bring a symbol of the Panther community’s creativity to the larger community, the group project that is the city of Atlanta, the mural itself can be seen as the collaborative result of hundreds of students’ creative efforts — their own group project.
“This mural mirrors the way that we, as students, are a smaller part of a greater whole,” said Sophia Sutton, a first-year student and studio art major who worked on the campus mural this spring. “Every GSU student is a part of what makes this campus fun, collaborative and supportive, and it just wouldn’t be that way without the students and staff that make it that way.”
Amber Toplisek (B.F.A. ’18), whose class installed the final piece of this semester’s campus mural one cool March afternoon, said while each student independently creates their motifs, combining them into a larger design is a full-class effort.
“They watch it grow and evolve into a larger thing,” she said. “They think a lot about relationships and how different pieces relate to others. The final design is everyone’s work.”
So, too, is the design of the community. It’s everyone’s work.
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