Boulder Rainbow Love
2025 Street Wise Mural Festival
Location: South facing wall on the west end of the alley, 1715 15th St, Boulder, CO 80302
Photos by Jeff Goldberg, Yukai Tomsovic, and Street Wise Arts
Koko Bayer’s Boulder Rainbow Love for #2025SWMF delivers a message of joy, hope, and pride, transforming the concrete beneath into a kaleidoscope of color. Her use of wheatpaste as a medium allows her to quickly transform landscapes with temporary, impactful installations.
Koko’s use of wheatpaste distinguishes her mural from others in our collection. Historically, the medium got its name from a paste made from wheat flour and water and used to adhere political messages, posters, and advertisements to walls. Such paste ups were typically very short-lived, but Koko has mastered the art of wheatpaste, using adhesives and techniques that stretch the lifespan of her works.
The artist creates large-scale designs digitally to fit the dimensions of the wall. She then divides the design into sections the size of her wing span. She partners with a commercial printer to print her designs on thin printer paper. Working in sections, Koko employs a gel medium to adhere the panels to the wall, using various brushes to smooth out air bubbles. The artist prefers working alone on her large wheatpaste murals to control all elements of installation and ensure the alignment of each section across the wall.
As a trans woman, Koko identifies with the festival theme of Joy as Resistance by choosing to create and share messages of hope and positivity. She views these actions as a direct disruption of the systemic adversity and oppression faced by the LGBTQ+ community. Her mural for #2025SWMF features the rainbow colors of the LGBTQ+ pride and trans flags stretching horizontally across the wall. The colors also form a heart with concentric circles that focus the viewer on the phrase love, seemingly creating a portal into a more compassionate world.
Koko often seeks to empower others to use their artistic voice. She hosted a protest sign-making workshop during the festival, inviting community members to make signs using pizza boxes and simple techniques. “I hoped participants gained a sense of agency and learned that art, even something as simple as cardboard and wheat-paste, is a powerful, accessible tool for making their voices heard,” Koko says about the Resistance Art Lab. She also serves on the leadership team of Babe Walls, focusing on mentorship and creating professional opportunities for women and nonbinary artists.
Although technically temporary, Koko’s wheatpaste mural provides an everlasting beacon of love and pride.
About the Artist:
Denver-based artist Koko Bayer is known for her impactful public art installations. Since 2015, she has transformed urban landscapes with thousands of temporary outdoor murals through her Temporary Structures Project.
In early 2020, she launched the Heart Project, a series of murals aimed at inspiring positivity during the pandemic. A proud trans woman, Koko responded a few months later to the cancellation of Pride celebrations in 2020 by starting the Rainbow Heart Project to uplift the LGBTQ+ community with messages of hope.
Over the past five years, she has created hundreds of large Pink Lemonade Hope and Rainbow Heart murals in public spaces, schools, hospitals, and shelters across Colorado and major cities, including New York, Chicago, Miami, and London. She has also sent thousands of stickers and small prints worldwide. Five years later, installation requests are still coming in.
Koko is part of the leadership team for Babe Walls, a non-profit mentoring organization that produces mural events for womxn and non-binary artists. The organization has produced festivals in Atlanta, Westminster, Arvada, Adams County, and the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. She is proud of the work being done to create opportunities for womxn and non-binary muralists.
She splits her work between creating permanent and temporary murals in outdoor and public spaces and making dimensional works out of folded printed and plain paper, cardboard, and concrete for exhibitions in her studio practice. Recent solo exhibitions include Pink Lemonade Hope at the Denver Botanic Gardens, Souvenirs and Hope Shop at Dateline Gallery, Imagine Love at the Bustop Gallery, and Folding Time at Alto Gallery.