Washington’s top real estate developer is painting murals in your neighborhood. Is it art or marketing? Or both?

It has long been an act of rebels, activists and, indeed, criminals to plaster the walls of a city with a can of spray paint. And it remains the pursuit of outsiders who do their work out of sight or in the dead of night.

Even for those who made a name for themselves in street art, such as Britain’s mischievous and scathing graffiti legend Banksy, the reward has often been to see one’s work quickly scrubbed or painted over by authorities.

Locally, there is an aggressive new commercial campaign to promote street artists and muralists. One painted a 65-foot portrait of F. Scott Fitzgerald, with a silhouette of his wife, Zelda, on the side of an apartment building. Another spray-painted an abstract array of bright polka dots and stripes on a brick wall in Rosslyn. A third blanketed the wall of a parking garage at the National Cancer Institute with images of the United States and Native Americans.

A group of painters is making over drab corners of the Washington area with large-scale murals, each bringing their own talent and inspiration to a genre popularized in the United States by graffiti artists. But all the new pieces share the same origin: the anonymous gray office building on Willard Avenue in Chevy Chase, Md.

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