In 2015, Jeremy Burns sat at a stoplight, studying the fins of a building. He imagined painting two images across them to create an optical illusion. Drive in one direction, and a girl appears. Look in the rearview mirror, and she becomes a boy.
The design eventually found a home on the finned exterior of an industrial laundromat on Larimer Street. It became Larimer Boy/Girl, one of Denver’s most iconic murals. Kids asked their parents to drive back and forth to see it transform. Graffiti tourists stopped to take pictures.
The colorful lenticular image blew people’s minds for over a decade. Burns kept it alive himself.
Then, a coat of beige concealed the long-standing aqua blue underneath. In May, a city graffiti-removal crew buffed the mural.
Larimer Boy/Girl didn’t disappear because people stopped loving it. When Burns could no longer maintain the mural for free, no organization had the funding, authority or obligation to keep his public art intact. Its disappearance raises a larger question facing Denver’s iconic arts district: Who is responsible for maintaining these murals once they become local landmarks?
Burns painted Larimer Boy/Girl for the love of the game and the benefit of his community. With a borrowed scissor lift, 10 gallons of donated paint and two weeks of unpaid labor, Burns finished the RiNo icon, free of charge.
But Larimer Boy/Girl was created in an entirely different era of RiNo.
When Burns first moved there in 2004, the rent was cheap and the area was quiet.
“Pretty much no one lived down there except for artists and DIY, punk rock mom and dads,” Burns said. “It had a weird small-town vibe where you knew all your neighbors and everyone was doing their own thing and being creative.”
Back in the day, he said, buildings were owned by people more supportive of the arts. Today, many have been replaced by high-dollar real estate developers.
When the mural started getting tagged around 2017, Burns lived just up the street. Several times a year, he headed over there with a roller, a bucket, and a bunch of leftover paint to touch it up himself.
Eventually, Burns moved to Golden and ran out of paint and patience. The commute grew longer. The unpaid maintenance became unsustainable. Around 2024, he decided to stop.
“If I would have kept driving into Denver and touching up all the tags, I’m sure it would still be up,” Burns said. “But I can’t work for free forever, you know?”
A few months before the buffing, Burns reached out to the building owner and presented his prices for future touch-ups. He didn’t hear back.
The building was getting absolutely bombed, he said, and the city hit a tipping point. The mural was completely tarnished by then, the fins painted over, the faces obscured.
“At that point, it’s like the original mural is not really there anymore,” said Burns. “You just kind of have to throw your hands up and let the universe take its path with the mural.”
Jana Novak, the majority co-owner of the Denver Graffiti Tour, and her small team passed the mural several times a week for years. They watched the tags gradually consume it. Still, Novak considers its decade-long run a lifetime in the world of street art.
“We have always explained to visitors that the very nature of street art is its ephemeral quality — once a street artist puts a work up, even they do not know if it will last 24 hours, 24 days, or 24 months,” Novak said.
For Burns, the mural’s disappearance was bittersweet but inevitable. There is a finite nature to murals, especially in a neighborhood that’s changing and has changed, he said.
Tracy Weil, co-founder of RiNo Art District, or RAD, said Larimer Boy/Girl represented the artist-led spirit that helped define the district’s identity. Street art was one of the catalysts of RiNo’s transformation, creating a unique sense of place and giving a voice to RiNo’s neighborhoods.
But as the neighborhood evolved, so did the informal ecosystem that once filled its walls.
“The neighborhood seems to be in some sort of weird transition or identity crisis with the whole mural arts festival reputation that it used to have,” said Burns.
“While there is a natural evolution to public art, it’s also a reminder that maintaining a thriving arts ecosystem requires ongoing investment and commitment,” Weil said.
The disappearance of Larimer Boy/Girl also revealed a maze of jurisdictions and limited funding. Despite its name, RiNo doesn’t control RiNo.
RAD helped create the RiNo Business Improvement District and RiNo General Improvement District in 2015. The two quasi-governmental entities collect additional property taxes to support services like infrastructure, safety, and streetscape improvements alongside cultural programming.
Since Jan. 1, RAD, RiNo BID, and RiNo GID are now fully separate organizations with their own priorities and budgets. RAD must raise the money needed to support its staff and programs, and no dedicated mural fund is currently in place.
RAD receives $17,000 annually in state and city funding connected to its creative-district certification, according to Daisy Fodness-McGowan. When murals like Larimer Boy/Girl cost $40,000 to $80,000, it makes funding these projects nearly impossible.
During the Crush Walls era, artists often worked for paint, portfolio, or passion, said Fodness-McGowan. Now, paying artists for large murals is much more difficult to fund.
RAD had no authority over the private building on which Larimer Boy/Girl was painted. According to Burns, the city graffiti-removal crew communicated directly with the building owner, and neither RAD nor Burns was notified before the mural was buffed. Fodness-McGowan said the city used a threshold to determine when a mural has become a graffiti nuisance, though she did not know how that decision was made.
The property owner controlled the wall. The city controlled its graffiti response. Burns had kept the mural alive himself, while RAD could only help pursue outside funding. No single organization was obligated to preserve Larimer Boy/Girl.
“Refreshing or replacing a mural requires resources, and artists deserve compensation for their work just like professionals in any other field,” Weil said. “Public art doesn’t happen by accident—it requires financial support from property owners, organizations, and the community.”
Novak remembers leading tours five years ago when new art appeared every week around every corner. Each tour became a fun adventure of discovery, she said, even as a tour guide.
But artists, residents and activists also complained that as RiNo became more gentrified, so did its art. Commissioned murals became more prominent while graffiti, the original form of street art, became less abundant, Novak said.
“Overall, support for street art has dropped precipitously — despite the fact that street art is what put the RiNo Art District on the map,” Novak said.
RiNo isn’t dead, but the buffing of Larimer Boy/Girl raises a question about its future: Can RiNo remain an arts district if the informal, artist-subsidized model that once decorated it with shapes and colors is no longer sustainable?
Burns remains optimistic.
The building owner who lent him the scissor lift a decade ago offered to dust it off once more. RAD discussed supporting Burns in any way it could. There is hope, said Burns, to take another crack at it.
If funding is secured, Burns hopes to collaborate with Anthony Garcia on an updated mural, drawing on the spirit of the original Larimer Boy/Girl while expanding beyond it.
But for now, the wall remains blank.
Novak said the Denver Graffiti Tour once joked that businesses weren’t required to commission street art because artists would cover their walls for them. The uncontrolled art kept RiNo alive, renewing the neighborhood as quickly as it changed.
“Blank walls were like scars” that needed to be healed immediately, Novak said.
“Lately, there have been more blank walls.”