Above is a photo of a mural on the side of a dilapidated building in Hot Springs, Montana, twenty minutes from my hometown. The town is in a forgotten corner of the Flathead Indian Reservation and is one of the poorest in the state.
Yet you won’t find graffiti or tagging anywhere, as you might expect for such an impoverished area.
Street art in rural western Montana, where I live, is very different from the street art you’ll find in cities. The only tagging I see is on the sides of passing train cars, and I almost never see murals consisting solely of human faces.
Instead, street art is used to make poor towns look more attractive, and to convey something of their past and present.
The mural above, for example, includes a large image of a man riding a bull at the annual rodeo, the biggest event Hot Springs ever sees. Beside it is a mish-mash of images depicting the history of the town: tipis to indicate the Native culture that has been here for millennia; a plow and hay wagon belonging to the area’s early white settlers; a classic car zooming into the future.