The latest in street artist Felipe Pantone’s stunning Optochromie series splashes across the facade of the Town Ballroom concert hall in Buffalo, New York, giving it a dramatic makeover. Black and white geometric prints overlaid with prismatic pixelated colors interplay with stretched out metallic elements, all created in computer modeling programs before they were painted onto the wall.

For fans of Pantone, this is familiar imagery reimagined in a fresh new way. The self-taught multidisciplinary artist, who does a lot of gallery work as well, is known for juxtaposing graphic patterns to achieve dynamic compositions, sometimes in sculptural form. Pantone’s signature style is highly influenced by the look of computer graphics in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when he was a child

The artist, who began painting on the streets as a preteen, cites Op Art and Kinetic Art of the 1960s as additional major influences, including the work of Victor Vasarely, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Julio Le Parc and Luis Tomasello.

“I was always trying, as every graffiti writer, to stand out in the streets so I started to emphasize on the contrast pictorially ending each piece in black and white,” Pantone says in an interview with Wide Walls. “I ended up realizing that by painting so much black and white I was approaching nearly optic pieces, so I slowly started adding up the full colour spectrum, which made my pieces more visible, with fluorescent colours. Quoting Joan Fontcuberta, there are more images generated than the number which we can consume, and as the artist has to out stand and graffiti has so much to do with art, I thought I should focus my effort on remaining visible over time.”

The former Lisa Frank factory in Tucson, mostly abandoned and sporadically for sale since 2001, stubbornly refuses to give up the rainbow-colored ghost.

Calling the Lisa Frank factory “hard to miss” is an understatement – the 300,855 square foot manufacturing facility has been baking in the desert sun since 1996. Located at 6760 S Lisa Frank Ave, the industrial building was once the workplace for nearly 400 employees but the firm’s decision to license and contract out design and production saw that number decline to a mere 6 by mid-2016.

We won’t rehash Lisa Frank Inc.’s troubled history, though ex-staffers’ tales of life at “the Rainbow Gulag” make fascinating reading. Colorful as the firm’s human history may be, this factory building plays a part by virtue of its larger-than-life décor, both inside and out. These images from Tumblr member fini date from January of 2017.

Call it faded glory if you like – both the firm and the factory have seen MUCH better days. The latter has actually held up rather well, all things considered. Spread over an 18.5 acre lot, the mixed office/manufacturing/warehouse building boasts a number of interesting architectural features including a copper-tinted glass panel facade.

It’s the building’s spectacular spectrum of color – a Lisa Frank trademark – that draws the eye, however. The jumbo musical notes, stars, and hearts have paled somewhat over the years but still have the power to evoke double-takes from passersby.

Ditto for the factory’s other exterior walls, one sporting a prismatic palette of pastel pink panels while the 30-odd loading dock doors around the back reflect an astonishing variety of contrasting hues.

Inside, 28-foot-high ceilings keep a small army of Frank’s larger-than-life characters from looking TOO oppressive. Who knows if the interior décor remains in situ at press time. Facebook member Edlin Romero was able to gain access in August of 2014… if the creepiness factor is any indication, she was lucky to make it back out.

What will the future hold for the Lisa Frank Factory? As mentioned, it’s been on and off the market more than a Trumpian ex-wife: Binswanger listed it in mid-2016 though a more recent, reduced-price ($13.25 million) posting at Loop-Net states “This Industrial Property is Off-Market”. Off-market maybe; off-color never!

The above shots snapped by Flickr member Julia Alexander (julialalexander1) in January of 2017 show vegetation beginning to encroach; something one doesn’t often see in suburban Tucson. Frank-ly speaking, all that’s missing here are a tumbleweed or two rolling across the pavement.

The world gets a whole lot brighter with the addition of vivid murals incorporating every color of the rainbow, splashed all over public surfaces like apartment buildings, walls, staircases and bridges. Whether they’re officially created in celebration of Pride in cities like Montreal and Minneapolis or simply because the artists love to work in vivid hues, these installations imbue their environments with a sense of hopefulness and joy.

5 Works in Vivid Color by Xomatok

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Peruvian street artist Xomatoc, who’s made a name for himself with vivid murals, paintings on canvas and other works, often travels around South America to bring his cheerful color palette to commissions and personal work alike. His works might be several stories tall – like new gradient rainbows throughout the Villa el Salvador district of Lima – or they might be as small and simple as painting a rock like a prism and leaving it behind for someone else to discover.

Staircase by DIHZAHYNERS in Beirut

A collective of artists calling themselves ’THE DIHZAHYNERS’ aims to “create initiatives to make Beirut brighter & more beautiful, through color.” They’ve certainly succeeded on that front with this stunning staircase (photographed by Nadim Kamel.)

Technicolor Ooze & Chromatic Cascade by Jen Stark

Artist Jen Stark works in both 2D and 3D, in gallery environments and in the public. When she gets to paint an entire building – as white and unadorned as a blank canvas – her talent really shines. ‘Technicolor Ooze’ is one such standout project, completed at The Platform in Culver City, California. Another is ‘Chromatic Cascade,’ a mural at 1825 Conway Place in the Arts District of Los Angeles.

Walk of Colors Montreal Installation

‘Walk of Colors’ is a fun public art installation along St. Catherine Street East in Montreal made of colorful balls strung over a pedestrian promenade in the city’s Gay Village. While in previous years, the balls have been pink, 2017’s edition manifested in an 18-tone rainbow sequence to celebrate Pride. 180,000 balls are divided into 18 segments of 10,000. Locals nicknamed it “18 shades of gay.”

Graphic Abstracted Works by Felipe Pantone

Graphic black and white patterns interplay with soft, fuzzy rainbows of color in large-scale outdoor works by Spanish-Argentinian artist Felipe Pantone. Sometimes these compositions are pixelated, sometimes they’re more fluid, sometimes they look like computer glitches or screenshots of ‘80s video games – but they’re always instantly recognizable as Pantone’s work.

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Prismatic Pride 20 Rainbow Centric Murals Street Art Installations

Surreal and at times a bit eerie, a rainbow road made of pure light winds through muted landscapes as if illuminating a path to another world. As it makes its way through snowy forests, across rocky creeks and along the seashore before pausing within an abandoned shed, it almost seems alive. For filmmaker and photographer Daniel Mercadante, there’s a sense of hope to it, a narrative that only becomes apparent when you see all of the images in the series on his Instagram. “When the journey felt long and lonely, can you remember you’re on the Rainbow Road?”

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The rainbow first appears in a dark and mysterious forest. It travels throughout the many diverse landscapes of California, skips all the way down to the lush jungles and weathered alleyways of Guatemala, reappears briefly on the West Coast and then finds its way to Connecticut before encircling Mercadante’s wife and creative partner, Katina Mercadante, in celebration of their anniversary.

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The project is a gorgeous example of just how magical long-exposure photography can be. It’s so simple to make – you just wave sources of light against a darkened backdrop while keeping the camera shutter open longer than usual – yet it seems to open a portal to another universe. Check out the Mercadantes’ Instagram to see the whole journey, or their website for their collaborative film projects.

It’s almost a cliche at this point to highlight the beauty that can be found in everyday items, like that scene in the movie ‘American Beauty’ where Wes Bentley and Thora Birch stare at a plastic bag waving around on a sidewalk like it’s the Mona Lisa. But sometimes, it just can’t be helped. Have you ever gazed at a traffic light and marveled at the accidental art it was producing? You’re about to.

Being such a humble and unremarkable object, installed at countless intersections in countless cities, the traffic signal is an unlikely subject of the internet’s flighty attentions, but the magic here is really in photographer Lucas Zimmermann’s vision – and in the fog that clings to the town of Weimar, Germany.

Zimmermann first captured his ‘Traffic Lights’ series on a particularly hazy night, noting that the light streaming from the red, yellow and green lamps was stretching out into rainbows. He wondered how the effect would be enhanced by long-exposure photography, and the results show the streams of light almost seeming to take physical form.

“I have been waiting for two long years to finally go out again and progress on my traffic lights series,” says Zimmermann. “It was worth the wait.”

The new addition to the series is just as striking as the first, supporting Zimmerman’s belief that photography can show us things we might otherwise overlook, “such as a simple traffic light on the street.”