Mona Caron at Mumbai Urban Art Festival

Photo credit: Dustin Fosnot

Mona Caron, a San Francisco-based muralist since 1998, is an internationally active artist and artivist specializing in large-scale murals in public space.

Best known for her worldwide series of multi-story murals celebrating the resilience of autonomous urban flora (Weeds), Mona began her public mural-making in San Francisco, where she initially focused on community-specific murals narrating local history and collectively visioned positive futures. Her immersive participatory social praxis around the creation of these storytelling murals was featured in an Emmy-winning TV doc, “A brush with the Tenderloin”.

Around 2006 Mona began an activity that she termed “phytograffiti“, and in 2010-12 she created a series of stop-frame mural-animation videos of wild plants growing through the pavement, at locations symbolic for their uplifting social initiatives. Her resulting video “Weeds” sparked an international proliferation of giant murals of tiny clandestine plants, created in the same spirit: a celebration of resilience. These large-scale, symbolic, site-specific botanical murals constitute Mona’s growing “urban macro-herbarium“, and have been featured on BBC News, Al Jazeera, PRI, went viral on online platforms, and have have sprouted as commissioned public art on 4 continents.

Throughout her two decades of artistic activity, Mona has contributed art for social movements in both mural and graphic art form. Some of her images for bike advocacy, farmworkers’ movements, neocolonial resistance movements, and the climate justice movement, have proliferated globally.

As part of Mumbai Urban Arts Festival, Mona Caron will paint a botanically-themed and community-inspired mural spread across 4 building façades in Lower Parel.