How ACL taps into local muralists for annual festival

AUSTIN (KXAN) — In the heart of Zilker Park during the 2022 Austin City Limits Music Festival, hundreds of festivalgoers stopped to take pictures with the iconic festival frames. Standing aside on the hill, muralist Stephanie Pelletier-Ramirez watched as lines of people snapped photos with her artwork — a design that took months in the making.

"It was probably the highlight of my life," she said. "All of these amazing people were standing in line to take a picture with something that I painted. There were people that got engaged on that frame this year."

Pelletier-Ramirez is the latest to join the list of Austin artists selected to paint the festival frames. The history is in the details — the frames are reused and painted over each year, with years of paint and previous designs baked under her 2022 creation.

Pelletier-Ramirez helped create the Lollapalooza frames several years ago at the request of Jason Dudey, C3 Presents' event manager and a personal friend. This year, her design selection came amid a huge career shift for her, as she moved away from her full-time marketing gig to create a construction and muralist company, Ramirez and Co.

Tapping into her marketing background, she said she wanted to create a design that would exist in tandem with ACL's new festival branding. The response has been overwhelming, albeit in the best way possible, she said.

Prior to the festival, Ramirez and Co. had already booked enough projects and customers that it had work planned for the next two years. As requests came in for design work during ACL, she and her team built up a resource guide of local artists they knew and trusted to help share leads on.

"We love to collaborate as much as we possibly can," she said. "Because there's so much coloring to do in all of these towns."

At C3 Presents' level, Pelletier-Ramirez said the entertainment agency that oversees ACL is looking to continue to diversify its pool of local artists to help create new pieces that can speak to the masses at festivals to come. That notion of championing Central Texas artists from all backgrounds and perspectives has Pelletier-Ramirez even more grateful that her brushwork is a piece of ACL's local legacy.

"It doesn't make sense that it's gone the way that it's gone, but here we are," she said. "And we're still painting everything all over Austin, all over small-town Texas. We're putting rainbows into every city we can get to."