13 years in, Louisville’s 2Buck Invitational street art event is ready to grow

Observant Louisville residents may have noticed a pattern with the building walls along Shelby and Logan streets in the Shelby Park neighborhood: They tend to transform this time of year. Those changes can be attributed to the 2Buck Invitational, a three-day mural painting event that attracts artists from around the city and country. The 2Buck Invitational runs Sept. 13-15 this year, marking its 13th anniversary. Formerly known as “All-City,” it was rebranded in 2016 to honor Jonathan “2Buck” Brown, a local artist who helped found the event in 2012 and died in 2015. Walking beside the train tracks that mark the boundary between the Shelby Park and Germantown neighborhoods, Trey Waterbury, one of the event’s organizers, showed The Courier Journal several artworks that have been produced in past years of the invitational. He referenced work by artists from Philadelphia, Columbus, and New York City, just a few cities where people come from for the event. Some of those paintings, Waterbury said, are destined to be painted over this year, but others will stay. That’s the beauty of the event and the yearly cycle brought on by participating artists. “I personally buff a lot of the walls, and I have people...