Downtown Melbourne Murals

The downtown Melbourne murals are concentrated on East New Haven Avenue, with others on Municipal Lane, Grant Place, Waverly Place, East Strawbridge Avenue and South Harbor City Boulevard, according to the Melbourne Main Street mural page.

That page, time stamped July 29, 2026, states that there are 16 distinctive murals in Downtown Melbourne that line the outsides of shops, and its gallery lists 16 entries by artist and address. Three listings are indoors: two Christopher Maslow works at 801 E Strawbridge Ave, one in the Hotel Melby lobby on floor 1 and one on the floor 11 rooftop, and a Cody Monahan work inside Sullivan's Jewelers at 1916 Waverly Pl. A Mark Gilliam listing at Renew Aesthetics shares the 833 E. New Haven Ave address with one of the Maslow listings.

The same page carries a mural location map for planning a walking tour, and Melbourne Main Street describes Downtown Melbourne as having much to offer within a walkable footprint. The table below repeats the gallery's 16 listings in the order the mural page shows them.

Melbourne Main Street launched a campaign to boost public art in downtown Melbourne in 2015, according to Florida Tech News in August 2022.

Florida Tech's February 2017 feature called the mural initiative the brainchild of Melbourne Main Street, noted that the organization's executive director at the time was a former Florida Tech employee, and described Melbourne Main Street as part of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The same feature said downtown Melbourne then had six completed murals, and it credited the partnership of Melbourne Main Street, Maslow and Florida Tech for the panther mural.

Melbourne Main Street gives its own reasons on its mural page: it believes public art is an essential component of community revitalization, and through the Melbourne Mural Project it engaged the creative sector to help beautify the downtown community. The page says the project has concluded but that the vision for the murals of Downtown Melbourne is only beginning, and it thanks Richard's Paint as the official paint sponsor of the Melbourne Main Street Murals project.

The organization behind the walls is described on the Downtown Melbourne history page as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that works to cultivate partnerships to revitalize Historic Downtown Melbourne.

Ad Astra is Christopher Maslow's 90-foot-long Florida Tech panther mural on a western wall at New Haven Avenue and Waverly Place in downtown Melbourne, unveiled in 2016, according to Florida Tech News.

Florida Tech gives the building's address as 800 E. New Haven Ave.

The mural is named after the university's motto, Ad Astra Per Scientiam, which Florida Tech translates as to the stars through science, and it shows the panther mascot strolling through land, sea and stars. The 2017 Florida Tech feature calls it a Florida Tech sponsored mural and says that during the summer of 2016 a concrete block wall on the side of the Baby Patch was Maslow's canvas. Maslow told the university that as a boy he passed that intersection and dreamed of painting the wall.

The mural has been repaired twice. Over the summer of 2022 Maslow fixed a patch of damage where the wall appeared to have fallen away, repainted areas including the space and sky, and added five new hidden references to the university: a plane for the aviation program, a globe for international students, the Apollo 11 rocket, the phrase Countdown College and an ROTC shield. WFIT carried the same August 16, 2022 announcement, which counted Ad Astra as one of 20 murals in downtown Melbourne and among the first painted after the 2015 campaign began. In that announcement the executive director of Melbourne Main Street called Ad Astra one of the most iconic and photographed murals in downtown Melbourne.

In February 2025, Florida Tech reported that Maslow had repaired the mural again after construction on its building damaged it, about three years after the 2022 work. That article says the mural was commissioned by Florida Tech, and Maslow described it as a gift of public art to Melbourne from the university.

Melbourne Main Street's mural gallery credits each of its 16 listings to an artist, and five of them go to Christopher Maslow, whom the page names as curator for the Melbourne Mural Project.

The other names on the downtown Melbourne list are Mark Gilliam with two listings, Cody Monahan with three, and Eric Wood, Jay REMOTE Bellicchi, the pair Sarah Painter and Cosby Hayes, Mike McCloskey, Ian Sodden and Reynaldo Gonzalez with one each. The gallery spells one name Ian Sodden while the artist spotlight lower on the same page spells it Ian Soden.

The page's artist spotlights add professional background. Maslow is described as a Melbourne-based fine artist working mainly in painting and sculpture who graduated in 2003 from The Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising and worked as a clothing designer in Southern California before turning to street art and then fine art. Bellicchi is described as a Boston transplant in the Miami art scene whose work grew out of graffiti and graphic design. Wood graduated from Melbourne High School in 1991, Soden is the in-house artist and graphic designer for Intracoastal Brewing Company in Melbourne, and Monahan attended the University of North Florida for fine art and business. The spotlight also features Monahan's Three Little Turtles mural.

Downtown Melbourne has 16 murals by the count on the Melbourne Main Street mural page updated July 29, 2026, while earlier Florida Tech reports gave figures from six in 2017 to 20 in 2022.

Each downtown Melbourne figure belongs to its date and its author, so the table keeps them apart.

Neither source explains why the 2026 list of 16 is smaller than the 2022 figure of 20, and the Florida Tech count of 20 is not broken down by wall, so the current gallery on the mural page is the best list to walk from.

The murals sit in a district that was rebuilt a century ago. The Downtown Melbourne history page says that in 1919 a fire destroyed all of the commercial buildings along Front Street, and that within a few years, during the 1920s Land Boom, a new commercial district emerged on nearby New Haven Avenue and the Ernest Kouwen-Hoven Causeway was built to connect Downtown Melbourne to the beachfront barrier island. The same page credits the railroad built in 1893 and the location on the Indian River Lagoon for the area's early growth.

Questions about the murals go to Melbourne Main Street, which the mural page lists at 2004 Vernon Place, Melbourne, FL 32901, phone 321.724.1741.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, with a fresh read of the Melbourne Main Street mural gallery and history page, the three Florida Tech News mural stories from 2017, 2022 and 2025, and the WFIT copy of the 2022 restoration notice.