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Murals were painted on buildings all over metro Atlanta, including the Kirkwood community, during the third annual Living Walls Conference. Twenty-six female artists from around the world came to metro Atlanta Aug. 15-19 for the painting event. Photo by Daniel Beauregard

Female artists from around the world descended on Atlanta Aug.15-19 for the third annual Living Walls Conference.

This year’s conference featured 26 artists from places around the world, including Zurich and Spain as well as metro Atlanta. The conference, which started in 2010, sets out to highlight a number of problems facing the city.

Alex Parrish, communications director for Living Walls, said this year the conference decided to feature an all-female cast of artists from around the world because in past years, nearly all of the participants were male.

“Through organizing this over the past years, we’ve had more than 50 artists participate and only two of them were female so we wanted to change that,” Parrish said.

All of the artists participating in the conference were responsible for creating a mural, or collaborating on a mural, in a public space in the city. A map of all the murals is available on the Living Walls website at www.livingwallsconference.com and includes areas such as Kirkwood, midtown Atlanta and East Atlanta.

“We’ll have 18 murals throughout the whole city,” Parrish said.

Parrish said the conference has grown and changed over the years. Each year the conference touches on a different theme and Parrish said this year’s theme should be pretty self-explanatory based on the artists who were solicited to submit work this year.

The five-day conference also featured film screenings, lectures, block parties, gallery exhibits and bike tours, all of which were free and open to the public.