The blank side of a downtown building is an invitation, and a growing number of Mississippi towns have started to accept it. Large-scale murals, many depicting local history and figures, have spread across brick walls from the Delta to the coast, turning ordinary streetscapes into a kind of public archive.

The projects are usually collaborations, funded by a patchwork of small grants, business sponsorships, and civic pride. The subjects are pointedly local: a hometown musician, a vanished landmark, a scene from a town's founding. The goal, muralists say, is to make history visible to people who walk past it every day.

The work has not been without friction. Debates over which stories deserve a wall, and who gets to decide, have surfaced old tensions in more than one community. But the disputes themselves are a sign of the medium's power. People argue about murals because murals matter.

For the artists, the appeal is the scale and the permanence, or at least the semi-permanence, of working in the open. A gallery show comes down. A mural stays up, weathering with the town, until it becomes part of the place it depicts.