ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) – It was summer in Anchorage, and Robert Wyland had been on a scaffold since early morning, brush in hand, racing the light.
He didn’t know it yet, but the sun wasn’t going to cooperate — at least not in the way he expected.
“I’m painting, I’m painting, I’m painting,” Wyland recalled. “And I go, geez, I’m getting tired, you know, and I’m watching the sun. It still hasn’t set. I go, what time is it? 4:30 a.m.”
He laughed at the memory. The midnight sun had swallowed his sense of time. By the time he climbed down, he said he had painted through the night without realizing it.
That mural — a sweeping, life-size rendering of bowhead whales and belugas on a building in downtown Anchorage — has stood for decades on the side of the 5th Avenue Mall. A traveler sent Wyland a photo of it just last week.
“If you’ve seen it lately, I’ve never seen a wall that old look that good,” he said. “It was in perfect condition.
“Alaska, salute you.”
That mural was one stop on a journey that has defined Wyland’s life. Inspired as a boy by Jacques Cousteau, he began painting whales at age four and never really stopped.
In 1981, he completed his first large-scale marine mural in Laguna Beach, California. When a reporter asked how many he planned to paint, he answered without thinking: 100.
He spent the next three decades making good on that number, and then some, painting life-size whales and ocean life on the sides of buildings from Portland, Maine, to Key West; from Havana to Beijing, logging 12 cities in 12 weeks on one tour alone, starting right here in Anchorage. More than 100 murals in all, each one a gift, he says, to the city that received it.
“My whole idea is to raise public awareness,” he said. “I wanted a billion people impressions a year to see the whales in public art, to become more sensitized and make the connection that the beautiful ocean, these whales, they really need our voice.”
For Wyland, the walls were never just paint. They were a mission. And for the communities that grew up around them, they became something else entirely, landmarks, touchstones, pieces of a city’s identity as fixed and familiar as any monument.
The Anchorage mural, he says, is no different.
“The people own these murals,” he said. “They become the fabric, you know, of a community like Anchorage. You know, that wall is sacred to people.”
Now, as the world’s attention turns to Dallas and the 2026 FIFA World Cup, Wyland finds himself in a very different kind of fight, one that he says cuts to the heart of what public art means, who it belongs to, and what the law says about destroying it.
Buried in Blue
The call came through his assistant. A man in a Dallas parking lot had sent an email: workers were painting over Wyland’s iconic whale mural, a landmark he completed in 1999, with dark blue paint.
“She told me and I said, can you ask them to send a picture?” Wyland said. “And I mean, it was disturbing, you know.”
By the time the image arrived, it was already too late to stop it. The mural, which Wyland describes as part of Dallas’s public art collection, had been covered over in preparation for FIFA World Cup branding ahead of matches scheduled in the city this summer.
Wyland calls it “blue washing.”
“You know how you whitewash the wall?” he said. “Well, it was blue, so I got a new word.”
The story went viral almost immediately. Wyland appeared on CNN. ESPN picked it up for the sports angle. He says more than a million people have voiced their outrage online.
“People are generally really mad at FIFA for instigating this, and it’s all their fault,” he said.
FIFA and the building’s current owner have not been without response. Wyland says they claimed to have been in communication with him and his foundation before the painting began.
“Total lie,” he said flatly. “Total lie. They never talked to us. They just did it and thought they could get away with it.”
He said a video sent to him showed six or seven blank walls nearby that could have been used for FIFA advertising instead.
“But no, they have to destroy one that really was part of the history of Dallas’ public art collection,” he said.
The law behind the brush
At the center of Wyland’s legal argument is a federal statute most people have never heard of: the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990, known as VARA.
“Look it up,” he said. “It’s the Visual Artists Rights Act. It’s a federal law. They broke federal law.”
Enacted by Congress and signed into law in 1990, VARA was the first federal copyright legislation in the United States to grant protection to what are known as “moral rights.” The law gives qualifying visual artists the right to claim authorship of their work, and critically, the right to prevent intentional distortion, mutilation, or modification of a work that would be prejudicial to the artist’s honor or reputation.
For works of “recognized stature,” VARA also allows artists to prohibit intentional or grossly negligent destruction of a work, a provision Wyland says applies directly to what happened in Dallas.
“They hit every box,” he said of the alleged violations.
The law’s protections exist independent of who physically owns the building or the wall. As Wyland put it: “If you look at VARA, the Visual Artists Rights Act, the artist owns the wall, at least the skin, okay? And it’s the artist’s complete ownership until he, you know, signs off on it.”
He has already filed a cease and desist. He says a lawsuit is coming.
He said he plans to donate any proceeds to local charities.
“I’ll donate all the money to the local charities,” he said. “I just want them to think twice before they destroy an artist’s work.”
What public art means and who it belongs to
For Wyland, the Dallas fight is inseparable from a larger question about the role of public art in American cities, a question with direct relevance to Anchorage, where his mural remains as a recognized piece of public art in the state.
“A mural, these murals that I did, I can speak for myself, are gifts to the communities,” he said. “The people own these murals. They become the fabric, you know, of a community like Anchorage. You know, that wall is sacred to people.
“Even if the walls that I paint with ocean whales aren’t on the ocean, they may be more important,” he said, “because they call attention to, hey, everything connects to the sea, the lakes, the rivers, the seas. Everything that happens upstream, the pollution, the plastic, it all finds its way into the ocean.”
The Anchorage mural was the first stop on a tour that took him from Alaska to Mexico City, 12 murals in 12 cities in 12 weeks. He chose bowhead whales for the Anchorage wall deliberately.
“The bowhead has been one of my favorite of the great whales, you know, and they’re so unique, and it was the perfect wall,” he said.
His connection to Alaska runs deeper than that single wall. He has dived in the Arctic, served as artist-in-residence on a National Geographic expedition, and most recently completed a monumental sculpture for Icy Strait Point in Southeast Alaska, commissioned by Norwegian Cruise Line for the Indigenous tribes in the region, who are known for their whale watching.
He is now planning a second series: 100 monumental sculptures for 100 great cities. Anchorage, he suggested, could be among them.
‘I’m doing this for all the artists’
Wyland is not framing this fight as personal grievance alone. He says he sees it as a test case, one that could set a precedent for how public art is treated across the country.
“I think I need to make an example out of them, the people that do this, and go after them legally,” he said. “And not for me. I just want them to think twice before they destroy an artist’s work.”
He pointed to another mural he painted in his hometown of Detroit, 26 stories high, that currently has a billboard blocking it.
“I’m going to stand up for the artists and public art now and forever, for sure,” he said.
For Alaskans watching the Dallas situation unfold, Wyland offered a direct message.
“I think they see that we probably should just keep the art where it is and appreciate it,” he said. “And it’s holding up so beautiful.”
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