I pass this mural every time I go to the grocery store and just love it. It’s a great addition to the neighborhood, and captures what is so wonderful about living in Adams Morgan.

There’s another really cool mural nearby, just south-east of Marie Reed. That one was painted by Big Al Carter (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/10/AR2009011002068.html). It’s a real neighborhood treasure, too.

I really quibble with the notion that this is graffiti, however. Clearly it’s something that took a lot of planning and coordination to develop, There were several artists painting it when it was going up. To me, this is public art, not graffiti.

Love the new work.

But I have a similar quibble to Annonny. I understand that “graffiti” most correctly denotes the style and format of the art, and the term does not necessarily imply vandalism. So at the outset I confess to probably being on the wrong side of semantics. I do think, however, that on most occasions “graffiti” is vandalism as an empirical matter, so it’s a bit of a tainted term to use with something like this. Because this issue comes up often enough on PoP, my main issue is that in this case, use of the term cheapens the effort, artistry, skill, creativity, and legality of this work (whereas on most PoP posts, I think use of the term “graffiti art” usually serves to validate criminal vandalism and minimize the culpability of the people who perpetrate it).