About the Artist
Ashley Hodder is a Pittsburgh native with over eighteen years of experience transforming public spaces into vibrant cultural experiences. She's produced more than 150 large-scale mural projects, and her work can be found from her hometown's Strip District to the legendary Wynwood Walls in Miami, from the Bushwick Collective in Brooklyn to walls across the globe.
But Hodder isn't just a muralist—she's an art therapist and educator who believes in creating art where it's needed most. She holds a B.S. in psychology from the University of Utah and an Art Education Certification from Carlow University. She served as artist-in-residence at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh for five years, taught in shelter schools and alternative education programs, and currently works with adults at the Allegheny County Jail. As she puts it: "Creating and teaching art in neglected and unexpected places is what Ashley enjoys most."
Her signature style combines pointillism—thousands of individual dots building into larger forms—with bright, tropical colors that feel like they belong on a Caribbean sunset.
About the Mural
When Ashley Hodder was young, she says her head was always in the clouds, dreaming. This mural is that memory made visible.
A woman's face emerges from (or dissolves into) a sky of deep purples, blues, and storm clouds. Her features are painted in a rainbow of impossible colors—coral pinks, electric yellows, lime greens, aqua blues—each hue bleeding into the next like light through a prism. Her eyes, rendered in amber and gold, gaze upward with a contemplative intensity. Thousands of white dots scatter across her skin like stars or freckles or dreams yet to be dreamed.
The composition is striking: her face dominates the left side of the wall while stormy clouds billow to the right, with a window from the actual building incorporated into the design as if it's a portal between worlds. Her head quite literally becomes the sky.
Hodder's signature pointillism is on full display—look closely and you'll see the individual dots that comprise her technique, each one placed with intention, building into something larger than itself.
About the Sponsor: Herc Rentals
Herc Rentals is a premier, full-service equipment rental company with over sixty years of experience and approximately 9,900 employees across more than 610 locations in the United States and Canada. Originally a subsidiary of The Hertz Corporation, the company was spun off in 2016 and renamed Herc Rentals.
From construction lifts and earthmoving machinery to power generators and climate control systems, Herc provides the heavy equipment that makes large-scale projects possible. Their fleet represents billions of dollars in ongoing investment — over $1 billion in 2023 alone.
For mural festivals, Herc's contribution is foundational. Aerial lifts — boom lifts, scissor lifts, articulating platforms — are what allow artists to paint walls that tower thirty, forty, fifty feet high. Without that equipment, the biggest and most dramatic murals simply aren't possible. They lifted the artists so the artists could lift the neighborhood.