05/04/2026
When you enter a room that has been graced by the brush of muralist Abel Macias, you are transported into a whimsical fairytale full of flora, fauna, and folklore–it’s an all-encompassing, singular experience.
But Macias didn’t set out to be a muralist. Trained as a fine artist at the Savannah College of Art & Design, he began his creative career painting on canvas. A love for street art and graffiti during his time living in New York, however, shifted his perspective, quite literally, toward larger surfaces. “I was immersed in this visual language of the city,” he recalls. “Even the trash on the streets started to look like art. It made me see walls as places for immersive storytelling.”
That shift from gallery walls to building walls was the beginning of something much bigger for him personally as well. A campaign for the iconic shoe brand, Doc Martens, became his first crossover moment, bridging street art and commercial work. But it was a chain of restaurants in New York—Dos Caminos—that brought it all together. “It was the first time I really got to express my Mexican heritage through art on that scale,” Macias says. “They gave me full freedom. They wanted it to feel Mexican, and I got to explore what that meant to me through folk art—animals, plants, colors.”
That personal connection—to heritage, place, and story—has become the heart of Macias’s work. His murals are full of visual metaphors and folkloric motifs, hand-painted in a distinctive, scratchy brushwork that feels both modern and deeply rooted. “There’s always a story,” he says. “Even if I’m not writing words, the animals and plants and shapes start to create their own dialogue. People who live with the murals begin to see new things in them over time.”
Join us for this conversation with celebrated muralist, Abel Macias, about blending heritage, color, and creativity. View the full feature at nestrealty.com/blog/from-fine-to-folk
