Forsyth Street in South Downtown picked up a long new stretch of color this spring, and almost 200 Georgia State University art students can claim a piece of it. On May 2, the university and the team behind the South Downtown district revealed an 80-foot mural at 80 Forsyth St. SW, built entirely from patterns designed by first-year students over the fall 2025 and spring 2026 semesters.
The timing was deliberate. The reveal landed on the district's College Day, alongside the weekly open-air Smorgasburg Atlanta market and its 40-plus food vendors, and a few weeks before FIFA World Cup matches began at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, a few blocks from the wall. Atlanta's eight-match schedule was expected to draw hundreds of thousands of soccer fans into the area.
The Forsyth Street piece grows out of a smaller project that Georgia State students already know well. Under the Courtland Street viaduct, on the side of the university's Student Center, a 14-by-6-foot mural is swapped out every semester. Its makers are the half-dozen sections of Two-Dimensional Design, a required Foundations course for incoming art students that teaches composition through shape, pattern and color theory. On campus, the project goes by the name "A Pattern Language."
The process builds from tiny to large. Every student starts with a one-inch design, then modifies and repeats it into a five-inch motif. Each class of about 20 students then pieces those motifs together into a single design three or four feet across, and the five to seven classes running in a given semester combine their panels into the finished wall. The campus version goes up with wheatpaste, a cheap, nontoxic adhesive of flour and water that can be removed when the next semester's work is ready.
For South Downtown, the scale changed by a factor of 14. Neill Prewitt, a senior lecturer in Georgia State's Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design who directs the Foundations courses and has a background in public installations, took the motifs from both semesters and arranged them to fill the much larger surface. Instead of wheatpaste, the Forsyth Street mural was printed on vinyl and mounted by a professional sign contractor. Prewitt described the goal as making something big while acting as a partner to the neighborhood, and giving students the sense that downtown, not just campus, belongs to them.
Georgia State's chief operating officer, L. Jared Abramson, framed the partnership as part of the university's push to create engaging public spaces for its community, and pointed to the chance for students to show their work to a worldwide audience during the tournament.
Students quoted in the piece talked about seeing the mural differently once they had a hand in it. Studio art major Laura Hayes walked past the campus wall last fall, before her own work joined it this spring. First-year student Sophia Sutton saw the mural as a picture of how individual students fit into the larger university. Faculty member Amber Toplisek, a 2018 B.F.A. graduate whose class set the final piece of this spring's campus mural, noted that while each motif starts as one person's work, assembling them is a job for the whole class.
The mural's new home is a district in the middle of a broad comeback. South Downtown, assembled by entrepreneurs Jon Birdsong and David Cummings, takes in 58 historic buildings on 16 acres along Broad and Mitchell streets, southwest of the Five Points MARTA station. The pair started acquiring properties in 2024 with plans for a mix of offices, shops and restaurants. Mitchell Street's Hotel Row already holds Tyde Tate Kitchen, Spiller Park Coffee and the record shop Crates, with Brewhouse Cafe, Bottle Rocket and El Tesoro lined up to join them.
Brianna Jackson, CEO of the nonprofit Heart of South Downtown, called the mural a link between the university and the neighborhood. Her organization connects businesses with mentorship, funding and workers, helps residents find training and jobs, and runs cultural programming in the district's public spaces. She described partnerships like this one as part of what gives the neighborhood its identity heading into the World Cup spotlight.
Original reporting by Georgia State University for SaportaReport.
