Sacramento Urban Mural Bike Tour

Sacramento's midtown and downtown neighborhoods form one of California's most concentrated outdoor galleries. On this bike tour, you'll explore the murals that transformed the city's walls during the 2017 Wide Open Walls festival. You'll also discover the wildly different styles – from hyper-realistic portraiture to geometric abstraction – that make this collection so visually striking.

The tour starts behind the River City Food Bank, where a mural by Sacramento's own Bryan Valenzuela greets you. His technique of embedding handwritten text into figurative work sets the tone for the variety ahead. You'll pedal through Midtown and Downtown Sacramento, weaving through alleyways and parking lots to find works by artists from Melbourne, Sheffield, New York, and beyond, each bringing their own culture and obsessions to these city walls.

Along the way, you'll encounter a 323-foot mural stretching the entire length of one alley, painted by the ARTners Collaborative around the theme of humanity. You'll also spot a monochromatic love story by UK cartoonist Phlegm, featuring his signature long-limbed human-animal hybrids. The tour ends at a mural by Sacramento artist John Horton, whose paintings mimic the distortion of corrupt digital files, blending crisp realism with a futuristic color palette.

On this 60-minute tour, you'll have a chance to:

• See Adnate's spray-painted portraits, influenced by the chiaroscuro technique of Renaissance painters like Caravaggio
• Find the hidden arrow in Tavar Zawacki's deceptively simple rolling-paper composition
• Examine Jorit Agoch's hyper-realistic faces, each marked with red scars referencing African scarification rituals
• Spot the dark themes of alcoholism and abuse of power buried inside How & Nosm's visually mesmerizing red, black, and white murals
• Admire Maren Conrad's large-scale work, created from paint and metal-leaf layered in resin
• View community panels by DDSO and TLCS, local non-profits whose artists painted alongside international stars

Bring a lock, a fully charged phone, and a readiness to see Sacramento from an entirely different angle.