Stroll down the streets of Belltown over the next five days, and you’re likely to see scissor lifts and cherry pickers hoisting local artists up the sides of buildings, with paint cans tucked around the corners of alleys, and a new bloom of vibrant color throughout the entire neighborhood.

Running now through Aug. 18, the Belltown Mural Festival kicks off the Office of Arts & Culture’s Hope Corps Downtown Mural Project. A key initiative of Mayor Bruce Harrell’s Downtown Activation Plan, the project will add more than 30 new murals from 35 artists, including Stevie Shao, Louie Gong, Monyee Chau, Sean Hamilton, and Ariel Parrow, around the city. 

“The mission for the mural festival is actually quite simple: to demonstrate the value of the arts — and the role of the artist — as a critical component of the city’s vision for the future,” says artist and arts advocate Aaron Asis, the current artist-in-residence for Belltown United, who is also leading the Hope Corps Downtown Mural Project in Belltown. “At the city scale, artists are the cultural bloodline of the city!” he says. “Their day-to-day lives are directly responsible for establishing the cultural tone of the city.  Without support for the artists, we lose that cultural force, and we surrender our city to alternative forces that leave us with a less soulful, less desirable, and less promising city to invest in moving forward. When done right, artists can be as integral a piece of the city’s operational engine as any other force.”

This approach, coupled with the desire to strengthen community — especially downtown, which, in recent years, has suffered losses of businesses, residents, and tourists — is the heart of the Downtown Seattle Mural Project. A collaborative effort between Visit Seattle, Downtown Seattle Association (DSA), Belltown United, CID Business Relief Team, SODO Business Improvement Area (SODO BIA), and Wing Luke Memorial Foundation, the program emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.

“It was a means of utilizing city resources to put money in the hands of artists, and for the general benefit of the community at large,” says Seth Geiser, DSA’s manager of urban planning & design. “That year, $700,000 was dispersed between six different organizations to go towards murals around the city.”

During the pandemic, Seattle saw a large proliferation of plywood on storefronts, and it wasn’t long after the lockdown measures were announced that artists jumped in, painting the unsightly boards with colorful images and encouraging messages. Pioneer Square, Capitol Hill, and Ballard saw an especially heavy concentration of work. “Originally, I expected that this was happening in downtowns across the country,” Geiser says, “but looking back, I realize that this was pretty unique to Seattle, which reflects the deep pool of creative talent we have here. A lot of feedback we’d hear was folks saying that these expressions of art really do enliven the streetscape and give a sense of community uplift.”

Each of the six organizations had a different approach for choosing its artists: Some opted for an open-call application process, others did direct selections or assembled panels of curatorial partners. Geiser notes that the timing of the Belltown Mural Festival emerged partly due to an ever-present Pacific Northwest factor: the weather. “There’s a good season to paint murals in,” he says. “The grant says we have to spend our money by the end of the year, so there ended up being a focus on getting the bulk of them completed in August.”

The festival offers free events each day, including a Summer Film Series showing, a Mural Walking Tour hosted by Asis and festival artists, and the Walls Out show at Belltown’s Basecamp 2, featuring work from more than 20 local muralists. Ten new murals will go up during the festival, with an additional 20 slated for the next six weeks.  

“The Belltown Mural Festival was created to inspire and demonstrate the power of art,” Asis says. “What artists can do for our communities reaches far beyond beautification, and our goals are to continue to showcase that through our words and our work. We will continue to push for more opportunities to inspire the public and recalibrate the cultural barometer of our city because it is needed, and the creative community in the city is ready to lead that charge.”

Find a complete list of events happening during the Belltown Mural Festival here.