Every September, Boulder becomes a little more dangerous — if you’re a blank wall, that is.
Street Wise Mural Festival is back, and no open stretch of surface is safe from the spray-happy battalion of muralists who will, for one weekend, turn the city into a technicolor battlefield where the only casualties are bare bricks and civil monotony.
The festival, now in its seventh year, runs 8 a.m.-9 p.m. Friday, 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Saturday and 3-5 p.m. Sunday at various spots around Boulder. This year’s theme is “Joy as Resistance,” and Street Wise Arts has once again assembled a dozen artists from around the country, who, whether they usually work in paint, sculpture, drawing or graffiti, are granted full and legal license to deface a strip of wall in the name of public art.
Or, as festival founder Leah Brenner Clack puts it, “artivism.”
“Ny using this platform of a mural festival, we explore artivism and themes around how we can use our voices through art to create community, but also create awareness around social justice issues,” said Brenner Clack, who started the festival in 2019, “(from) climate issues and diversity issues — all kinds of things that we deal with in our society every day, in our communities every day.”
Artivism has also spilled off the streets and into art galleries in exhibits that have taken the community by storm. Brenner Clack points to Boulder’s infamous street artist, SMiLE, as proof of what that visibility can spark. SMiLE’s work started popping up nearly a decade ago, back when Clack was curating shows at Madelife on Pearl Street, she said.
“We did a show with SMiLE back then, when he was just starting to put work out on the streets,” she said. “That was probably nine or 10 years ago, and it felt like the early days of this blossoming street art scene in Boulder.”
Armed with a hand-cut stencil, several cans of spray paint, and an inconspicuous get-up, SMiLE (“midnight ninja” or Boulder’s Banksy) discreetly impresses his vibrant creations onto the more mundane parts of Boulder, creating whimsical art undercover in the dark, the Camera reported last year.
Now SMiLE’s pieces fill art galleries and sell out shows. “To the Moon,” his current solo show, is on display at the NoBo Bus Stop Gallery, 4895 Broadway, Boulder.
“Love you to the moon and back again is a phrase from my childhood that has stuck with me throughout life and is a colloquial term expressing how I feel about the city of Boulder,” SMiLE said in a release about his exhibit. He continued: “My art has taken me through a diverse array of experiences that I did not anticipate but have been thrilled at nonetheless … yet always there at the heart of why I do this is the city that I love. To the moon.”
After selling nearly every piece and pulling in record-breaking crowds for the North Boulder Art District, SMiLE’s show wraps on Saturday.
“SMiLE has become so prolific, creating a whole beautiful culture around his work in Boulder,” Clack said. “It’s been amazing to witness that progression. And having Street Wise grow out of those early days into what it is now feels really special.”
That kind of reception says a lot about where Boulder’s street art stands: What once might have been dismissed as vandalism is now part of the city’s cultural infrastructure, driving both community attention and economic energy.
For a couple of weeks this month, the NoBo Art District hosted a Street Wise pop-up shop featuring works for sale by the Street Wise Mural Fest artists.
But now it’s back to the streets. Friday and Saturday, muralists will be elevated on lifts and ladders, painting in real time while the rest of us shuffle between walking tours, bike tours and panel discussions. While most of the action will take place in downtown Boulder, one rogue mural is going up in North Boulder at Shining Mountain Waldorf’s new high school.
“It’s one of the biggest walls, and one you shouldn’t miss,” said Clack. She said the piece will help expand the public art presence in NoBo. “It’s also right next to where the future BMoCA Creative Campus will be, so in a few years it will be part of that larger community.”
The artist behind that mural is Nonie Cruzado, a Boulder-based Filipino visual artist who will be on site at the school, 999 Violet Ave., Boulder, Friday morning, brush in hand, as the festival kicks off with a public, family-friendly coffee hour. The mobile Emory Jane Coffee Co. will be parked nearby, keeping spectators caffeinated while they watch the wall take shape.
For the remainder of the weekend, the murals and events stay clustered around the city center.
“I’m very excited that most of our walls are downtown again this year,” Clack said. “Downtown is the hub of visitor traffic, but also of community, with Pearl Street, Central Park and the libraries. There’s always a lot going on, always people around. Having the walls downtown is great for the artists to get their work seen, and to have a centralized location where people can do a walking tour, see murals and meet artists, and also visit some of our restaurant sponsors.”
Guided tours leave from festival headquarters at The Crowd Collective,1711 Pearl St., throughout the weekend, although wandering aimlessly with a muffin and a map works just as well. After sunset, some of the murals will come alive with projection mapping, as digital animations crawl across the paint and briefly turn brick walls into moving works.
Saturday brings back more tours alongside workshops and a closing party. One highlight of the day is artist Koko Bayer’s Resistance Art Lab, where visitors can create a protest sign from 3-5 p.m. Saturday at 1711 Pearl St., by slapping wheatpaste and stencils onto pizza boxes — proof that in Boulder, even dissent comes with a recycling plan. All levels of artists are welcome to join; the drop-in event is for those who are passionate about using art for change.
The weekend wraps from 3- 5 p.m. Sunday at the Boulder Public Library, 1001 Arapahoe Ave., Boulder, where Denver artist Bimmer Torres will give a lecture on his path from graffiti writer to large-scale muralist. He’ll also lead a hands-on design session with local youth before collaborating on a new community mural, part of the city’s Experiments in Public Art program.
In the seven years that Street Wise has been happening, the number of murals has ebbed and flowed, from a modest 10 in year one to more than 30 in 2020, when the city leaned heavily on outdoor art as both expression and escape. These days, the festival typically adds around 20 to 25 new works each fall, keeping the focus on intentional impact, rather than sheer volume.
Artist selection rotates between open calls and curated invitations. This year’s lineup was drawn from Street Wise’s own artist roster, highlighting fresh voices who hadn’t yet made a mark on a Boulder wall.
“We have 12 great artists, 11 murals, with one artist duo, Bimmer Torres and Rapha Sok, painting together,” said Brenner Clack.
“It’s really important to always consider who’s getting a seat at the table,” she said. “Underrepresented folks, especially women, LGBTQIA, as well as Black, Indigenous and artists of color don’t get opportunities as much as other populations do.”
One of those artists, Aerica Raven, is a muralist from Fort Collins whose art vibe looks like a children’s book swallowed a philosophy textbook. Her walls are full of animals with human quirks, exaggerated poses and colors straight out of Saturday morning cartoons. That style traces back to her Kansas upbringing, where she split her time between doodling nonstop and working in scenic theater, building and designing spaces that turned plywood and paint into whole other worlds.
“I found a great love in the idea of immersive art, creating environments that could transport people into not just different worlds, but different stories,” Raven said.
By the time she hit college, sculpture and installation had taken over her studio practice, but murals gave her the space she craved: part painting, part world-building.
“The opportunity to continue that practice with my love of painting, and be able to expand on a wall and really change spaces in that way, has just been addictive,” Raven said. “I’ve been doing it ever since.”
You can spot a Raven mural by its cast of characters, which include expressive animals with a twinkle of mischief, painted using bold lines, dramatic colors and a sense of familiarity that feels like a Saturday morning cartoon cracked open and poured across a wall.
“You’ll find a lot of animals and colors and line work that are reminiscent almost of some of your favorite children’s books,” she said.
For this year’s Street Wise mural, Raven leaned into the festival’s theme of “Joy as Resistance,” with a strange and tender exchange: a bird giving a cat a worm, and a cat offering up a not-dead-yet mouse in return.
“We can all have different beliefs, but that doesn’t mean we have to turn each other into ‘others,’” she said. “What’s more important is what they’re trying to do for each other, and finding that common ground.”
Her goal is to stop people mid-step with her works.
“With this particular piece, I wanted to both make people smile and get that initial sense of joy and play and playfulness,” she said. “But digging into details, there are a few interesting interactions within the mural that I hope people stop and say, ‘Well, wait, that’s weird.’”
Raven has been connected to Street Wise for a few years through its education programs, and said this theme felt close to her heart.
“Something that we all can share is joy,” she said. “To be able to do that here in an area that I very much adore … it’s been really cool hearing people’s interpretation of it and what it means to them, not just what it means to me.”
Raven is also refreshingly honest about the behind-the-scenes grunt work of mural painting.
“You have to understand the logistics: how high is the wall, is the wall a really difficult surface, like deep brick, or does it have special needs, like untreated metal, so you have to prepare it so the artwork can last.”
Even the viewer’s perspective matters.
“Public art is a service for the community, so muralists should be aware of that and serve their community in that way,” she said.
Cha, a Boulder-based artist by way of the French countryside and Miami, takes a different tack. Where Raven’s walls brim with expressive animals, Cha’s are anchored by a single recurring figure named Chacho: a gray, alien-like figure with a smooth, bulbous head, beady eyes and a long, droopy chin.
Chacho was born not long after Cha landed in Miami at age 16, unable to speak English and looking for a way to connect.
“The first people I met there didn’t speak French either, but they included me in their groups, and they were all drawing,” she said. “That’s when I really picked it up, and that’s also when I created my character, Chacho.”
Chacho has since traveled through galaxies, towns and dreamscapes of Cha’s making. Sometimes he’s solitary, sometimes multiplied, but always inquisitive, and acts as a mirror for the artist’s own habit of watching, mimicking and absorbing whatever new world she finds herself in.
For this year’s Street Wise mural, she’s sending Chacho to a dinner party.
“I thought a lot about the theme and different ways of interpreting it visually,” she said. “What I landed on was the idea of a communal gathering, and, for me, the best example is sharing a meal. Around food, people come together, share ideas and find joy.”
Her mural shows four Chachos seated at a dinner table, each in a different room, but sharing one toast — a playfully surreal scene that turns cubes into cozy dining rooms.
“So my mural is that idea: four different people, four different rooms, but all eating together.”
The mural is meant to be funny on purpose.
“I hope when people see my mural, they giggle a little, and that they find it funny,” she said. “I love when people look at my art and just laugh. I hope it brings that out of them, and also that they think it’s something different from what they usually see. Mostly, I hope to bring them joy, and maybe not change their whole lives, but at least give them a smile for a moment in time.”
Raven’s playful allegories and Cha’s wandering Chacho say a lot about what Street Wise has become. While the weekend is fleeting, the murals linger, building a citywide gallery that grows every September.