Los Angeles is known for many things, but it’s not often the world gives the city enough credit for its art scene—or, in this case, specifically its street art scene.
A new survey by online gambling company Betway does just that: According to an internal analysis of 132 cities from around the globe by the website, Los Angeles is the top destination in the United States to see street art. In fact, L.A. nabbed the number five spot on the site’s worldwide ranking, behind Paris at number one, London at number two, Melbourne at number three and Berlin at number four.
To come up with its list, Beltway looked at a few metrics, including the number of identified street murals in a town, related Instagram and TikTok posts, the number of articles with city and street art mentioned, engagement with said pieces and average yearly Google searches.
In total, survey leaders identified 2,272 street art locations in L.A., specifically mentioning that “the city has the most street art murals” in all of the U.S. “It also has the most Instagram posts of all cities in the U.S., with 222,486, as well as the highest number of article-mentions (536).”
The study specifically calls out artist D*Face’s comic book-like Blue For You mural, which was created in collaboration with Branded Arts, as well as “A Mosaic of Peace and Justice” in Culver City. Completed back in March of 2022, that latter mural is a six-and-a-half story piece on the facade of an area apartment building that was created by Shepard Fairey in light of the war in Ukraine.
If you’re a local, you’ve undoubtedly come across even more incredible murals in your own area, whether HUEMAN’s beautiful Bloom in the Arts District, Corie Mattie’s P-22 memorial in Silver Lake, Robert Vargas’s building-sized Shohei Ohtani mural in Little Tokyo or the many Kobe Bryant tributes all over the city. We are, indeed, the very best around.