If you’ve driven along the northbound Loop 10 onramp from Lexington Road in the last few months, you may have noticed the orange and white traffic barrels, bright orange barriers and local artist Amanda Burk wearing a high-visibility vest while bringing her latest work, a 100-foot mural, to life.
Located off the East Campus Connector, “Georgia Flora” features gardenias, camellias and azaleas that spill across the wall in crisp, bold linework with careful detail and a retro feel. The design is based on a linoleum block print Burk created, and the leaves were intentionally kept black and white—appearing gray from a distance—to allow the flowers space to pop. The title doesn’t reference the plants as native to Georgia, but rather as ones she found Georgians commonly associate with memories.
“A lot of people start conversations about their grandmother as ‘whenever I smell a gardenia I think of my grandma’ or ‘my grandma’s camellias this,’” she says. “The gardenias, camellias and azaleas all have a very nostalgic feel for Georgians.”
Burk’s design was chosen by a community panel using a blind selection process from a pool of 25 applications submitted during a nationwide call for art. The project was funded by Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax (SPLOST), a 1% sales tax approved by voters that funds a variety of capital improvement projects, including public art, and facilitated by the Athens-Clarke County Leisure Services Arts Division.
It’s the second large-scale piece on the Oconee Rivers Greenway, a linear park and trail system, joining Elaine Stephenson’s “Water is Life,” an immersive underpass design beneath the North Oconee Access Road bridge that features water and wildlife.
Going into the project, Burk wasn’t sure what to expect. She’d painted on walls before and endured the elements—it comes with mural making—but working on the side of a highway was new territory.
“I was worried about things that people might yell at me that might be kinda a bummer, and debris coming off the road,” she says. “But for the most part, people would give me a beep on their car horns and shout sweet things. I was really pleased with how the interaction with the public was.”
Still, the visibility took some getting used to.
“Painting and art making in general is kinda a private thing for a lot of artists,” she says. “So having people watch you figure out what you’re doing and painting is like having someone watch you while you sleep. I’m in a private headspace, and then cars are there.”
The daughter of an art teacher, she says becoming an artist was inevitable. She’s spent most of her life creating and exploring different mediums. After earning undergraduate and graduate degrees in printmaking, she went on to teach printmaking, bookmaking and papermaking at the collegiate level. She later opened two print shops of her own: Double Dutch Press (2012–2016) and Flat File Print Shop (2022–2024), where she taught classes, provided studio space for printmakers, offered screen services for screen printers, graphic design services and sold limited-edition hand-printed prints.
She stumbled into painting murals after designing Automatic Pizza’s logo. “They asked me to paint the logo on the side of the building,” she says. “Then Bain [Mattox], the owner of Automatic and Normal Bar, asked me to paint a second mural—a giant slice of pizza—on the building, and it just kind of snowballed from there.”
She was then asked by Half-Shepherd Market (now closed), Boulevard Animal Hospital and more to bring her work to their walls.
“I didn’t know how to [paint murals] beforehand, but just kind of figured it out,” Burk says. “I can’t exactly put it into words, but something about printmaking and graphic design—being able to figure out ratios, scale things up or down and know what will work on a certain surface—those were all tools in my toolbox that helped with mural making.”
A common thread in Burk’s work is the feeling of nostalgia, inviting viewers to connect through their own memories and interpretations.
“My personal artwork deals with nostalgia,” she says. “Inanimate objects that often have associations for a wide swath of people. I like when people see something and associate a specific memory with what they’re looking at—classic folding lawn chairs, old rotary phones, things like that.”
Regardless of the medium, her bold use of color and ability to create connection shine through.
“I think there’s not enough whimsy in the world,” she says. “I’m attracted to things that are whimsical and humorous.”
As for what’s next, Burk plans to focus more on her personal art after years of teaching others. Her next mural is set to be at Nové Město, a small brewpub brought to you by the owners of Hi-Lo that’s coming to Barber Street in the Atlas Building (near Hidden Gem). She’s also started to apply to paint murals nationwide to bring her whimsical style art to even more cities and towns around the country. Click over to instagram.com/ourladyofmurals to follow along.
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