Photo by J Miles Wolf
As a part of USA Today’s 10Best Readers’ Choice Awards, Cincinnati is once again among the top contenders for the title of Best City for Street Art. The Queen City claimed the title in 2024 and hopes to maintain it for another year.
Cincinnati is up against 19 other cities, including Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Honolulu, Jackson (TN), Nashville, and New York City, among others. For four consecutive years, Cincinnati placed in the top 10: second place in 2021 and 2022, eighth in 2023, and top prize last year.
“We’re thrilled to help get our hometown the recognition it deserves,” says Jill Dunne, ArtWorks senior director of marketing and communications. “We were selected because Cincinnati has an impressive range of public arts murals.”
ArtWorks is a non-profit in the Greater Cincinnati area that creates community-based public art, giving career opportunities to artists of all ages. In its 27 years, ArtWorks’s collaboration with community organizations and businesses has turned the city into a sort of art gallery itself, featuring more than 14,000 public and private projects and more than 300 permanent outdoor murals.
“We have built an incredible public art gallery among out city’s communities and nurtured the creative potential of thousands of individuals,” says Dunne. “With BLINK, individuals and other organizations adding to the public art scene, we’ve helped to define Greater Cincinnati’s global reputation as an arts destination.”
Photo by Mitchell Gibbs
To be considered for voting, a panel of experts in each of the 10Best categories look at the reputations of cities as a whole and then put them up for nomination. After Cincinnati was nominated, they reached out to ArtWorks for a mural that best represents the city. This year, ArtWorks chose the Cincinnati Toy Heritage mural designed by Johnathan Queen.
While the title of Best City for Street Art is mostly symbolic, Cincinnati’s 2024 win led to recognition across the country.
“After earning the top spot last year, I heard from a number of news outlets around the country who wanted to talk to us about our program and Cincinnati’s great public art,” says Dunne. “We even had a great interview that led to an amazing feature in The Saturday Evening Post, the oldest magazine in the United States with an estimated three million readers each issue.”
According to Dunne, Cincinnati deserves to win “because street art here is more than putting paint on walls, it’s about transforming neighborhoods and building connections. Through ArtWorks, we’ve turned blank spaces into vibrant, meaningful murals that tell our city’s story. Each mural represents collaboration between talented professional artists, young creatives, and the community.”
You can vote once daily for Cincinnati for Best City for Street Art at USA Today. Voting ends at noon on February 17.
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