The Easy Way to Hang Art on Brick or Stone

This post was originally published on DIY Network’s blog Made + Remade in October 2015.

Hanging art and decorations can be challenging and damaging, but there’s a trick! Before you break up your brick or mess up your masonry with wall anchors, there are a few amazing products you MUST know about.

First, a few things:

• I tested two different products, one is the Brick Clip® Fastener (above, front) and the other is a block clip from The Hillman Group (above, in the background). (You can buy them both on Amazon – Brick Clip® and Block Clip)
• These are definitely marketed as products to be used with brick for good reason – bricks are manufactured for consistency, and the products are designed to fit common brick sizes. I have stacked flagstone in my own home, so my true curiosity in testing these products was in whether I could make use of them too. Spoiler alert, one works, the other doesn’t, but they are both GREAT on traditional brick.
• Bricks can vary in height, so the Brick Clip® Fastener is available in 3 sizes to accommodate this variance (learn more about types of brick here). Flagstone walls are a different story – at the narrowest points, my stones are all roughy 1″ tall with a 1″ mortar gap. If you’re reviewing this product for your own stonework, keep in mind that the natural materials are subject to greater variance.

I found that the product by The Hillman Group was a better fit on my flagstone walls. With this design, the clip creates tension between the bottom of the top stone and the top edge of the lower stone. The tabs at the top are rigid, but still thin enough to be bendable, so I adjusted the angles to fill the wider space between the flagstones.

The teeth clamp against the top of the stone, and the tabs act as a spring holding the accessory in place. The product itself is very narrow, allowing your decor to rest flush against the wall. The clips hold 25-50 pounds, which makes it useful for most artwork and decor you want to display (even large scale art and wall hangings).

I don’t have brick on my home, but I know plenty of people who do. I bought the other product, the Brick Clip® Fastener to see if any of its sizes would attach to my stone. To attach correctly, I would have needed a very large clip, one in the 3-4″ range, to attach around the height of two horizontal flagstones and the mortar mashed between them.

While it wasn’t perfect for my stone, they did work wonderfully on classic brick, even in instances when the mortar was nearly flush with the brick surface:

Damaging your stone, brick, or mortar for the sake of decorating is irreversible, but I’ve been really impressed with how these products can help you hang decorations both indoors and out.