Jessie Unterhalter and Katey Truhn is a Baltimore-based artist duo known for large-scale murals, sculpture, and public art that use saturated colour, pattern, and motion to change how a place feels. Working together since 2012, they create abstract interventions for walls, façades, ground planes, and other architectural surfaces, often bending compositions around corners or letting them spill downward into the street. Their practice treats public space as something that can be animated, softened, and made more approachable through design.
- They work as a collaborative duo rather than as separate solo practices.
- Their core mediums are mural painting, fine art, and sculptural elements.
- Their visual language relies on bold colour, symmetry, repetition, and curved geometry.
- They often draw on woven textiles, natural patterning, and formalist abstraction.
- Their projects are designed to respond to existing architecture instead of covering it indiscriminately.
What do Jessie Unterhalter and Katey Truhn make?
The duo makes public-facing artwork that sits between painting, sculpture, and environmental design. A Jessie and Katey project might begin as a mural but extend into dimensional forms or painted ground treatment, so the final work reads as part image, part built environment. Their surfaces are typically clean, graphic, and highly legible from a distance, with shapes that repeat, rotate, and interlock.
They often favour acrylic paint and other durable mural materials suited to exterior conditions, though the exact process changes with each site. Because the work has to survive weather, foot traffic, and scale, fabrication and installation matter as much as composition. The result is not a framed object but an intervention that changes how people move through a space.
Why do they matter in public art?
Jessie Unterhalter and Katey Truhn work in a tradition of muralism that treats colour as a civic material. Their projects are often used to brighten neglected or overlooked structures, but the work is not simply decorative. The duo uses abstraction to give a building a more active presence, turning blankness into rhythm and offering a visual cue that a place has been considered rather than abandoned.
Their approach matters because it is site-specific without becoming literal. Instead of illustrating local history or branding a surface with a slogan, they use form, repetition, and spatial movement to create atmosphere. That makes the work adaptable across different settings, from walls and underpasses to plazas and façades, while still carrying a recognisable hand.
How does their style work on a building?
Their compositions often respond to the geometry of the architecture itself. A straight wall may be broken by a sweeping curve; a corner may become a hinge where colour shifts direction; a flat plane may extend onto the pavement so that the painting reads as an environment rather than a panel. This relationship to the site gives the work a sense of motion, as if it were unfolding across the surface.
Pattern is central to that effect. The duo borrows from woven textiles, natural sequences, and formal abstraction, translating those references into bands, arcs, stripes, and repeating modules. Bold contrasts keep the image crisp at scale, while symmetry and rhythm help the viewer read the work quickly in passing, which is essential in public space.
How did the duo develop?
Jessie Unterhalter and Katey Truhn began collaborating in 2012, building a shared practice that combines painting, design thinking, and an interest in how environments shape mood. Based in Baltimore, they have developed a body of work that moves across murals, fine art, and sculpture, but remains consistent in its goal: to bring playfulness into places that might otherwise feel anonymous or neglected.
Their studio identity is tied to collaboration itself. The work does not depend on one artist’s signature style; it depends on the exchange between two makers who share an interest in colour, architecture, and public experience. That collaborative method helps explain the clarity of the finished pieces, which feel designed, balanced, and tested against the space they occupy.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are Jessie Unterhalter and Katey Truhn muralists or fine artists?
They are both. Their practice includes mural painting, sculpture, and fine art, and the categories often overlap in a single project. A wall piece may contain the logic of a painting while functioning like an environmental intervention.
What visual ideas shape their work?
Their work draws on movement, symmetry, pattern, and bold colour combinations. References to nature and woven textiles appear in the way forms repeat and interlock. The overall effect is abstract, but it is structured enough to feel ordered rather than chaotic.
Why are their projects often described as transforming a space?
Because the work changes the visual temperature of a site. A plain wall or underused structure can feel more active, more welcoming, and more intentional once it carries one of their compositions. The transformation comes from colour, scale, and the way the artwork engages the architecture around it.