Stoned Rosetta Stone: The Hidden Details of Austin’s Greatest Mural

When Kerry Awn, Tommy Bee, and Rick Turner picked up their brushes and painted their own little history of Weird Austin on a wall just off the Drag, they didn’t think it would last more than a few years. They definitely didn’t think it would become as iconic as the figures and buildings they hid in the complex design of the work of art called “Austintatious.” But over five decades later, it’s a definitional part of what we think of as Austin

It’s a work of in-jokes, references, and hidden histories that, after 50 years, have become opaque to many people who walk past. That’s why Austin filmmaker Mike Woolf launched an interactive website to host short films that explore its hidden messages, and now he’s adding five new documentaries to the project.

“Austintatious” was created to celebrate the decision the previous year to close off that stretch of 23rd Street to create space for the open-air Renaissance Market. In its anamorphic depiction of the Austin skyline, the artists hid dozens of references. There were the obvious Austin icons – an armadillo there, a violet crown there – but also the people and the places of Austin in the mid-Seventies, whether they be international stars like Willie Nelson and Johnny Thunders, or local fixtures like future multi-time Austin Chronicle Best of Austin-winning photographer Alan Pogue, and the Smile Guy that collected donations for the People’s Community Clinic. It’s these Easter eggs that Woolf and his team have been preserving. “It’s the stoned Rosetta Stone of Austin,” Woolf said, and his task in the website and films has been to “decipher the hippie hieroglyphics.”

This act of digital conservation and art history lives online at 23rdstreetmural.com. For Woolf, its genesis lies in the making of his 2014 documentary, Crazy Carl and his Man-Boobs. Woolf described that feature as “a love letter to Austin, and in making that film we met a lot of these characters, a lot of the authentic Austin poster artists from that era.” That’s when he met Awn, who he hired to design the film poster. “I went to go pay him, and he went, ‘Hey, meet me at the 23rd Street Mural. We’re repainting it because it got tagged. Bring cash.’”

That meeting gave Woolf time to look at the mural in greater detail than he ever had before, and to realize how little he really understood about its fascinating symbolism. “I’m getting that tingly documentary feeling, but I look at the thing and it kind of looks like a frame of film, it kind of looks like a laptop, and then I went, well, let’s make it a virtual mural and tell a bunch of short stories.”

Archival image of a line outside the original People’s Free Clinic on Guadalupe Credit: Alan Pogue / courtesy of 23rd Street Mural Project

Woolf launched the first iteration of the website in 2023 to celebrate the mural’s 50th anniversary, with the first tranche of those short docs. Like the semi-regular restorations that keep the original artists coming back to the mural every few years, now Woolf has found himself revisiting his own work. He has completed those five new shorts, which will premiere at the AFS Cinema on Sept. 10 ahead of their addition to the website. “I just haven’t figured anything else to do,” he commented drily. “I realized that, if you can’t beat ’em, just outlast ’em.”

When Woolf first met the trio, he discovered that the mural had been repainted to remove tagging five times in its history. Over the years, keen-eyed observers may have noticed that these weren’t simply restorations, but a chance for Awn, Bee, and Turner to make a few alterations. Woolf said, “They’ll be like, ‘Who’s that?’ ‘Ah, I don’t remember,’ and they’ll just paint over it and put someone else in.” In the 2002 renovation, the trio swapped out an anonymous streaker for naked-bongo-playing-era Matthew McConaughey, while Hank Hill appeared in the grounds of the Butler Mansion. “Each time, it keeps evolving. The mural has grown, just like the city has.”

Similarly, the website was not static even before the new round of documentaries was completed. Woolf said, “We’ll find old photos that will surface, and we’ll just re-edit the cut and upload it to Vimeo.” Some re-edits become whole new films. The original website has a documentary about peyote in Austin, aptly named “Peyote in Austin,” which has been completely re-edited for the second round of films as “Peyote in Austin: The Trip Begins” after Woolf managed to get an interview with Vulcan Gas Company founder Don Hyde in which he went into a wild anecdote about how LSD and peyote covered the downpayment for the legendary Austin music venue. “It’s the best story,” Woolf said, “so we remade the whole film and now it’s a full 11-minute story that really gets to the heart of what makes Austin Austin.”

Being able to capture that history of Austin is important for Woolf, especially important stories that aren’t part of the cool mythology of the city but were just as important. He described the selection of the original subjects as “scattershot,” to give an overview of the mural, but this latest quintet of stories gave him an opportunity to tell stories that are “way more dialed in.” One of the new shorts, “Miracle in the Church Basement,” allowed him to not simply recount the early days of the People’s Community Clinic in the basement of the Congregational Church, but to give tribute to its ongoing mission. “We arranged a reunion for a lot of the nurse practitioners and a lot of volunteers, we brought them back to the church basement, and then we went and interviewed the people who are running People’s Community Clinic now. So it was way more involved and thought out and outlined versus when we started out.”

That short in particular shows how time moves on – just as Awn, Bee, and Turner are no longer the enthusiastic young art students who first painted “Austintatious.” Yet while keeping the mural as fresh and fascinating as the day the first layer of paint dried has become their lives’ work, their time as its guardians is coming to an end. Woolf said, “It got tagged again last year, and they basically said, this really is the last time. We’re getting too old, it’s getting too hot, it’s complicated. It’s time to pass it on to the next generation.” 

The 23rd Street Mural Project season 2 premiere will take place at AFS Cinema, Thursday, Sept. 10. Tickets and info at austinfilm.org.

Find out more about the 23rd Street Mural Project at 23rdstreetmural.com.

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