Anna deserves an arts community — so we’re building one.
Anna Arts Council is a 501(c)(3) bringing grants, spaces, events, mentorship, and public art to one of the fastest-growing cities in America — at no cost to the taxpayer. Founded by an artist who gave away more than 400 paintings, for a town that had no arts infrastructure at all.
It began with 400+ paintings — every one given away free.
Anna Arts Council was founded by Aubre’ Murphy, creator of The Warpaint Project. Since 2019 she has donated more than 400 original paintings — for friends, family, and strangers; for auctions fighting ALS and cancer; for booster clubs and fundraisers. Not one was sold. Each had to be earned by a story of courage — a child or woman fighting to survive. “They paid me in bravery, beauty, and stories so profound they inspired the art itself.”
Her work hangs in executive offices, law firms, boutiques, and multi-million-dollar homes. It has been given in hospital rooms and hospice, placed on easels beside loved ones at their services, called a prized possession — once even named in a will. Families turned their gifts into logos, book covers, banners, and apparel. In November 2023 she received a Mayoral Proclamation for the Warpaint Project.
When she moved to Anna, she went looking for other artists, for an arts council, for a single mural or painted bench. She found none. That scarcity became a calling. She enrolled in college at 47 to learn nonprofit, business, and marketing skills, met with every city leader, studied the arts districts of North Texas — and made a promise: to build, for Anna’s artists, the community she never had.
“If I could do all of this with art — imagine what any of them could do, living in a town where artists are finally valued.”
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson · J.K. Rowling · Margot Robbie · Kim-Joy
The problem we exist to solve
Anna is racing from 27,000 toward 100,000 residents — and arriving with no cultural infrastructure at all. No designated arts district. No public art. Not a single mural, painted bench, or arts event. Meanwhile every dollar spent on creative services leaves town. Anna Arts Council closes that gap — building an arts identity Anna chooses, rooted in the artists already living here.
What we do
Anna Arts Council is the medium between artists and the city — finding the funding, building the spaces, and teaching the skills that turn talent into a thriving local economy.
A bridge between artists & the City
A dedicated seat at the table — representing artists in downtown planning, city projects, and the arts & culture line of Anna’s master plan.
A grant-finder for local artists
Finding arts funding and passing it through to the artists, programs, and public works that keep every dollar inside Anna.
A builder of spaces
Creating the places Anna never had — studios, galleries, walls for murals, and room for artists to gather and grow.
A teacher of the business of art
The entrepreneurial skills most artists are never taught — pricing, branding, selling, marketing, and building a real career.
An events maker
Art shows, festivals, auctions, exhibits, classes, workshops, and pop-ups — answering the city’s need for public art and programs.
A source of local creative talent
When Anna needs murals, decor, design, or content — the work goes to neighbors, not outsiders.
How we build it
Three connected programs give Anna’s artists what starving artists almost never get: business skills, a place to sell, and a name in the local economy.
A gathering space where artists learn the entrepreneurial skills school never taught them — how to price, sell, market, and run a real creative business.
Where artists, writers, and musicians show their work, tell each piece’s story, sell prints, and build an online gallery so the whole town has access to the arts.
Branding, content, social media, and website work — the creative services a growing city needs, best fulfilled by its own talented artists.
The arts don’t cost a city — they pay it back.
Anna Arts Council helps the city switch on funding tools that already exist in Texas law — the 1%-for-art option on capital projects, the hotel-occupancy-tax arts share, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Texas Commission on the Arts. None of them draw from the general fund.
We follow the proven models of North Texas — Dallas, Fort Worth, McKinney, Plano, Frisco, Prosper, and Denton — where cultural districts have raised property values, drawn visitors, and created creative-sector jobs without raising taxes.
Regional figures reflect published outcomes across established North Texas cultural districts; results for any city depend on local decisions and funding.
Who we serve
“We are not professional artists. We are wives, mothers, teachers, mail carriers, high-school students, widows, cancer survivors — and we are Anna neighbors.”
Partner, sponsor, or support the arts in Anna
Whether you’re a grant maker, a donor, a sponsor, a business, or a neighbor who believes Anna deserves murals of its own — there’s a place for you here.