Mural Career: Twenty Years of Paint on Walls

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Sean Bono has been painting murals professionally since 2003. What started with a gelato shop in Little Italy has grown into a career spanning commercial brand campaigns, underground street art, international collaborations, and large-scale public installations. This is the timeline of how that happened.

The Early Work: New York City (2003–2008)

My first professional mural was for Ciao Bella Gelato on Mott Street in Little Italy. I was 21 years old, still deep in my training at Pratt Institute and the New York Studio School, and somebody was willing to pay me to paint a wall. That was all I needed to hear.

From there I connected with artist Ben Angotti, and together we painted four large-scale murals for Goodwill’s Chelsea location in Manhattan. That project taught me how to work at scale in a commercial environment with deadlines, client expectations, and public visibility. It was a different world from painting canvases in a studio.

I kept the momentum going by painting construction barriers during building renovations for Macaluso Architects, a New York architecture firm. These were temporary pieces by nature, but they introduced me to the idea that even a construction site could become a canvas and that property owners would pay for that transformation.

Throughout this period I was also building ArtBattles and painting constantly on my own, developing the speed, scale, and confidence that would define my commercial work later on.

The Painter Agencies Called: Brand Campaigns and Live Work (2004–2018)

From the beginning, I was the tool that marketing agencies and brands reached for when they needed something painted by hand. The work ranged wildly. I designed and produced stickers for Rawkus Records. I painted political posters for Pink Floyd’s campaign using art to combat violence in the Middle East. I painted live at fundraisers in clubs throughout New York City, in galleries, and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Wherever someone needed a painter who could perform under pressure and deliver at scale, I showed up.

The early projects were community mural campaigns for major brands including Verizon, Fox, and Sony. The formula was straightforward: go into a neighborhood, paint a mural that serves both the brand’s message and the community’s visual landscape, and create content around the process. I was doing exactly what I’d been doing with ArtBattles, just with Fortune 500 budgets behind it.

The work scaled quickly. What started as New York City projects expanded to East Coast campaigns and then to nationwide mural production through various marketing agencies. I went from painting walls myself to managing teams of artists across multiple markets simultaneously.

One of the biggest campaigns was for The Blacklist, the hit NBC series. I organized and managed mural installations by local artists in the nation’s largest media markets. Each mural was a large-scale, artist-designed brand piece that had to work both as advertising and as public art that the local community would embrace. It was production management, creative direction, and artist relations all at once, and it proved I could operate at a national scale.

During this period I also worked on major movie promotional campaigns, translating studio marketing materials into hand-painted installations that generated buzz and social media content in ways that traditional advertising couldn’t match.

The European Tours: Cultural Diplomacy Through Paint (2010–2012)

While the commercial work was building in New York, I was simultaneously touring Art Battles through Europe, producing live painting events and performing on stage in front of thousands. This wasn’t remote management or sending instructions overseas. I was on the ground in Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Barcelona, Madrid, Amsterdam, and cities across Poland, personally producing and managing every stop on the tour. Meeting with local artists face to face. Painting live on stage. Sitting down with European press and doing interviews. Fully immersed.

In Paris, I produced events at Forum des Halles and painted alongside artists like Skio, Move, and Miel Krutzman. In Spain, I worked with El Niño de las Pinturas, Kram, Daniel Tomas, and Japon. In Amsterdam, I collaborated with Krutzman and other European artists. Between events, I maintained an active legal and illegal wall painting practice with ArtBattles artists in every city we passed through.

In New York, I was part of the community at 5 Pointz in Queens, the legendary outdoor art exhibition space that was considered the world’s premiere graffiti and street art mecca before its controversial whitewashing and demolition. Painting at 5 Pointz meant your work was seen by thousands of people daily and judged by some of the most talented aerosol artists on the planet. It was a proving ground.

In Paris, I painted at the Hall of Fame walls. In every city on the tour, I sought out the spots where the best local artists painted and showed up with a can in my hand.

What I was really doing was serving as a cultural ambassador, representing the United States and New York City for the arts across Europe. Art Battles created genuine cultural diplomacy through live painting. American and European artists sharing stages, collaborating on walls, learning from each other’s traditions in real time. That kind of exchange doesn’t happen over email. It happens when you’re standing next to someone on a scaffold in Barcelona at two in the morning, and it shaped everything about how I understand art as a bridge between people and places.

These weren’t vacation trips with a spray can. They were working tours with serious artists who brought different techniques, different cultural perspectives, and different approaches to public space. What I learned painting a wall in Granada or Paris directly influenced how I approached a brand mural in Brooklyn or Los Angeles.

Large-Scale Art Collaborations and Battle of the Buildings (2010–2016)

Back in New York, Art Battles was expanding into major venues. We launched 5 Bryant Park and Webster Hall’s new venue The Wall, where we painted murals and held battles. The combination of live competitive painting and large-scale mural production at these iconic NYC spaces built the momentum for what came next.

As ArtBattles grew, I began producing murals alongside the competitive events. What started as painting murals at ArtBattles venues evolved into something bigger: creating and producing large-scale collaborations between internationally recognized artists.

The pinnacle of this work was the Battle of the Buildings in New York City in 2015. I managed production on two building-scale murals in the East Village where CERN and El Niño de las Pinturas went head to head, each painting a full building exterior in a competitive format that brought the ArtBattles energy to an architectural scale. I also produced a collaborative mural by both artists on a hotel at Canal Street and Lafayette, a high-visibility location in the heart of Manhattan.

These projects represented the convergence of everything I’d been building: the competitive spirit of ArtBattles, the production expertise from nationwide brand campaigns, the international artist relationships from years of painting walls around the world, and the technical knowledge to execute large-scale exterior work in New York City. Managing scaffolding, permits, artist logistics, and building owner relationships while two world-class artists painted competing murals on adjacent buildings was the most complex production challenge of my career up to that point.

In 2016, I took that production expertise to San Francisco where I managed and painted a giant Barry McGee design onto a parking garage. The project was funded by SFMoMA and produced on behalf of ICU Art. Grafting a design by an artist of McGee’s stature onto an architectural structure at that scale required precision production management and hands-on painting skill in equal measure. It was the kind of project where my dual identity as both a working painter and a large-scale production manager came together in a way that few people in the mural world can offer.

From Production to Independent Practice (2018–2020)

In 2018, I left the team at ICU Art and began producing mural campaigns for Art Battle, applying the same large-scale production management skills I’d developed over the previous decade to the competitive live painting movement I’d originally created in 2001.

During this period I also began building my own independent commercial muralism practice, painting murals for major entertainment properties including Planet of the Apes, the Harry Potter franchise, and She-Ra. These projects put me directly in the intersection of brand marketing and large-scale hand-painted work, translating iconic entertainment IP into murals that functioned as both public art and promotional campaigns. It was the bridge between managing other artists’ productions and establishing myself as the painter brands hired directly.

I also continued taking on projects for various marketing agencies, including a set of glow murals in Los Angeles that pushed the technical boundaries of what a painted mural could do. UV-reactive and luminescent paint work at scale required a completely different approach to color, layering, and surface preparation, and added another dimension to my toolkit.

BonoPaints: Dual-Coast Commercial Practice (2020–Present)

In 2020, I launched BonoPaints as a full commercial mural practice. For the last six years I’ve produced murals for Nike, Asics, Hoka, Kona, and other major brands, with the bulk of the commercial work based in Los Angeles. On the East Coast, I’ve continued painting artistic murals and personal works that keep the creative side of the practice alive alongside the brand campaigns.

The client list spans major athletic and lifestyle brands alongside local businesses on both coasts. The work ranges from large-scale exterior brand murals visible from blocks away to intimate interior installations for restaurants, bars, and retail spaces.

Every project I take on today carries the accumulated knowledge of twenty years of professional mural work: the scrappy resourcefulness learned painting construction barriers in Manhattan, the production management skills from nationwide brand campaigns, the artistic credibility from painting at 5 Pointz and Hall of Fame walls across Europe, and the competitive edge sharpened through thousands of hours of live painting with the best artists I could find.

The brush is still in my hand. That hasn’t changed since Mott Street.