The People Behind the Paint
Meet the Artists
Every Color Speaks was brought to life by two visionary muralists whose individual practices — and shared belief in the power of community art — converged on the walls of downtown Lynchburg.
Lead Muralist
Marcus Webb
Lynchburg, VA
"I paint what the neighborhood already knows about itself — I just make it visible."
Marcus Webb grew up in Lynchburg's Garland Hill neighborhood, where the walls of corner stores and community centers were his first canvases. He began painting murals at 17, self-taught and driven by a need to see his community reflected in the spaces it occupied.
Over the past fifteen years, Marcus has completed more than 40 public murals across Virginia, Maryland, and Washington D.C. His work is rooted in the African American experience of the Mid-Atlantic South — drawing on oral history, family photographs, and the visual language of the Black church, the barbershop, and the front porch.
For Every Color Speaks, Marcus led the community listening sessions and translated the stories he gathered into the mural's central figures — monumental portraits of Lynchburg residents rendered in warm ochres, deep cobalts, and the amber light of a Virginia afternoon.
Medium
Exterior latex, spray paint, oil-based enamel
Education
Self-taught; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellow, 2019
Influences
Jacob Lawrence, Charles White, the walls of Garland Hill
"This mural is a love letter. Not the romantic kind — the kind you write when you've been away too long and you need the place you're from to know you still see it. Every face on that wall is someone who deserved to be seen."
— Marcus Webb, Artist Statement
Selected Works
Roots & Routes
Richmond, VA
The Long Table
Washington, D.C.
Every Color Speaks
Lynchburg, VA
Collaborative Muralist
Soledad Reyes
Roanoke, VA (originally Bogotá, Colombia)
"Color is the first language. Everything else is translation."
Soledad Reyes arrived in Virginia at age twelve, carrying the visual memory of Bogotá's vibrant street art scene and the quiet determination of someone who had learned to make herself understood without words. She studied fine arts at Virginia Tech before building a practice that bridges painting, printmaking, and large-scale public installation.
Her work is known for its bold, saturated palette and its insistence on the political dimensions of beauty. Soledad's murals have appeared in community centers, transit corridors, and school facades across the American South, and her studio practice has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Virginia Commission for the Arts.
On Every Color Speaks, Soledad was responsible for the mural's abstract passages — the sweeping fields of color that move between the figurative panels, connecting individual stories into a single visual breath. She describes these sections as 'the grammar that holds the sentences together.'
Medium
Exterior latex, acrylic, hand-mixed pigments
Education
BFA, Virginia Tech; MFA, Virginia Commonwealth University; NEA Fellow, 2020
Influences
Débora Arango, Beatriz González, the color fields of the Andes
"I came to this country not speaking the language, and art was how I survived that. Color was how I said: I am here. I exist. I belong. That's what I wanted every person who walks past this mural to feel — that they belong to something larger than themselves."
— Soledad Reyes, Artist Statement
Selected Works
Lengua Madre
Roanoke, VA
The Crossing
Charlotte, NC
Every Color Speaks
Lynchburg, VA
Working Together
Two Voices, One Wall
Marcus and Soledad first met at a public art symposium in Richmond in 2021. Their practices were complementary in ways neither had anticipated — his deep roots in figurative narrative, her command of color and abstraction. When the City of Lynchburg issued its open call, they submitted a joint proposal.
The collaboration was not without friction. They disagreed about scale, about palette, about how much space to give to abstraction versus portraiture. But those disagreements, they both say, are visible in the final work — and that's exactly right. A mural about a whole community should contain some tension.
"We didn't always agree. But we always agreed on what mattered."
— Marcus Webb & Soledad Reyes
See the mural in person.
Downtown Lynchburg, Virginia — free and open year-round.