A year ago, Oshkosh's Riverwalk had one big mural and a lot of people talking about it. Mauricio Ramirez finished his riverfront piece on the back wall of the Cummins plant in October 2025, and Milwaukee Magazine reported it as the largest mural in Wisconsin. Since then, Discover Oshkosh has commissioned more walls, and their locations show a plan. The new art is going up at the places where the trail leaves the water, crosses a campus edge or runs past a cemetery, and not along the downtown stretches people already walk.
Discover Oshkosh says this is on purpose. "We don't want all our public art concentrated in one or two places," Executive Director Amy Albright said in the organization's September announcement of the Riverside Cemetery mural. "We see a real opportunity to create destinations all along it, investing in places that make you want to keep walking, biking and discovering what comes next."
Read that way, the murals work as a map. Each one sits at a spot where a walker might otherwise turn around.
The first wall set the scale
The Cummins mural is the anchor, and it shows how far the project is willing to go. Discover Oshkosh calls it "A 1,000-Foot Tribute to Oshkosh's Past, Present, and Future" and puts its length at 1,076 feet. Ramirez's own portfolio gives a larger figure of 25 by 1,300 feet. Under either number, it is a wall you walk along. You don't take it in from one spot.
It faces the river from the back of the plant at 1005 High Ave. According to Discover Oshkosh's original announcement, the imagery covers the city's timber and manufacturing history, OshKosh B'gosh, aviation, the photographer Lewis Hine and the axle work Cummins does inside the building. The same release says you can reach that stretch by heading north from the UW-Oshkosh campus or south from the Oshkosh Public Museum.
That approach matters. Before the mural, this was a stretch of riverbank behind a factory. Now it is a reason to walk the gap between campus and the museum.
Campus got the second piece, and it faces the street
The Kolf Sports Center piece was the odd one out in 2025, and it helps explain the rest. Josh and Carla Marquardt of Art City Wraps installed a 6,400-square-foot graphic wrap on the concrete berms in front of Kolf along High Avenue. UW-Oshkosh Today described it as honoring Titan athletics, including its history, strength and diversity. The chancellor's office said the wrap was in place by Oct. 8, 2025.
The wrap sits on High Avenue, the same street as the Cummins plant, so a walk between the two takes you from the trail to the street and back. The 2026 pieces build on that idea.
2026: three walls, three hard-to-reach stretches
This year's series moved to places where the Riverwalk is easy to miss or easy to leave. Here they are in the order Discover Oshkosh commissioned them.
- The Landmark Mural, Fox Valley Technical College Riverside Campus. Nick Goettling, a muralist from Tacoma, Washington, painted a fox head that blends into a winding river. Small scenes along the river show FVTC programs. It covers the river-facing east wall of the campus building. Goettling spent most of August in Oshkosh, and FVTC's newsroom posted the finished wall in mid-September.
- Mill Madonnas, Greene's Pour House at The Granary, 44 W 6th Ave. Yonder, an Algoma studio, painted this 40-foot cinderblock wall. Its central figure holds a sleeping child and is crowned in pine, with a raven at her shoulder. Log trains, water towers and smokestacks fill the scene on either side.
- The Riverside Cemetery mural. Local artist Neo Medina was commissioned to wrap a pole building at the southwest corner of Riverside Cemetery in a forest scene. The design puts an owl flying through the trees on the side that faces the river. Discover Oshkosh said painting would start the week of Sept. 15.
Goettling told the Oshkosh Herald that he designed the FVTC wall to be seen from more than one direction. "We know some people will be seeing it from the river, some from the bridge and some from the riverwalk," he said. The Herald also reported that FVTC surgical technology students came out to help him paint the river that runs through the piece.
The Granary wall was chosen for the detour
Mill Madonnas makes the plan easiest to see. At The Granary, the Riverwalk leaves the Fox River, winds through the Sawdust District and then returns to the water. Yonder's project page says Discover Oshkosh picked the wall "so that people walking that detour would find something worth the walk."
The subject fits the setting. The Sawdust District takes its name from the lumber era, and the mural looks at the people that era's history usually leaves out. Yonder's statement points out that the city's story has mostly been told through the mill owners, Paine, Sawyer, Buckstaff and McMillen. It says Oshkosh was "held together by the people that story leaves out, the women of the Sixth Ward and Polonia." Discover Oshkosh's Mill Madonnas announcement connects those women to their organizing during the 1898 Oshkosh Woodworkers' Strike.
Yonder's page credits the mural to Don Krumpos and Erin LaBonte. The Herald photographed Yonder artist David Carpenter at work on the wall in August.
The cemetery stretch joins the Cummins wall
The Riverside Cemetery site extends the line north from Ramirez's wall. The city lists the cemetery at 1901 Algoma Boulevard, and Discover Oshkosh places the Cummins mural just south of it. That puts two pieces of public art on one stretch of riverbank that few people would have called a destination two years ago.
Medina's forest theme comes from what's already there. The release points to the cemetery's mature trees and the old timber pilings still visible in the Fox River nearby, which are left over from the lumber industry. The site also sits just south of where Knaggs Ferry once ran. On a late-October walk, the cemetery's real trees will be losing their leaves around the building Medina was hired to paint.
Walking it this fall
Discover Oshkosh describes the Riverwalk as a 2-mile, flat, paved route along both sides of the Fox River, linking downtown to the Wiouwash Trail. The wider system of riverfront trails that the mural program is meant to fill out is an 11-mile loop. The trails page lists these parking spots:
- West of the river: near FVTC on North Campbell Road, Boatworks Park on Michigan Street, and Dockside Tavern on West 6th Avenue
- East of the river: Mahoney's, Becket's, Ground Round and Riverside Park
The North Campbell Road lot puts you right at the Goettling wall. Dockside Tavern on West 6th Avenue is the closest listed lot to The Granary. For the Cummins and cemetery pair, the route Discover Oshkosh suggested last year still works: walk north from campus, which takes you along High Avenue past the Kolf wrap.
Three walls are next
The project already has its next sites. Discover Oshkosh's Riverwalk Activation page lists three more project sites.
- The Convention Center skywalk, which connects the Marriott Waterfront Hotel to the Convention Center and spans North Main Street at the south entrance to historic downtown.
- The Pioneer Island retaining wall, on the island's north shore, which greets boaters coming into the Fox River from Lake Winnebago.
- The Mercury Marine retaining wall, on the company's Oshkosh campus along another Riverwalk detour.
None of the three has an artist or date on the project page yet. They follow the same pattern as this year's walls. One is a gateway into downtown, one is a gateway from the lake, and one is a second detour where the trail leaves the water. Albright described the goal in the cemetery announcement: eventually, "you can enter or turn off the riverwalk almost anywhere and know there is something worth discovering in every direction."
Along the Fox River, nearly every street that meets the Riverwalk has its own story. At Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate Special Properties, we enjoy talking about the trail, the walls along it and the Oshkosh streets on either side. If a stretch of the river has caught your eye this fall, get the Special Advantage and talk with our team today.
