Chroma Zone 2024 artists, continuing to disrupt the mural festival status quo
With mural season in full swing in Minnesota, we’re excited to continue being part of Chroma Zone Mural and Art Festival in 2024 by providing a thoughtful and equitable artist selection process. Free and open to the public, Chroma Zone is Minnesota’s largest art and mural festival. It is produced and located within the Creative Enterprise Zone (CEZ), a city-recognized district of Saint Paul and non-profit dedicated to attracting and supporting creative people and businesses. Begun in 2019, the annual mural festival celebrates artistry and adds to the neighborhood’s long-term beauty, economic viability, safety, and walkability while supporting artists and entrepreneurs, and sparking creative economic activity. Forecast’s team is proud to continue facilitating the festival artist selection. As the creative consultant for Chroma Zone, we bring a deep knowledge of the district (having been based in this Saint Paul neighborhood for over 25 years) and a mission to advocate for public art that advances justice, health and human dignity.
As a national organization, we’re concerned that many mural festivals continue to lag behind in ensuring full representation of BIPOC, women and non-binary artists. We see a part of our role with Chroma Zone to disrupt the mural festival status quo. To date, Chroma Zone has produced 56 murals in the Zone, 89% by local artists, 77% by BIPOC artists, and 57% by women or non-binary artists.
FORECAST’S ROLE
CONTINUING TO EMPHASIZE RACIAL AND GENDER EQUITY TO DISRUPT THE MURAL FESTIVAL STATUS QUO
We are a proud founding partner on the creation of this festival and are happy to serve as an ongoing Creative Consultant to the Creative Enterprise Zone as they move forward with this incredible event. As a facilitator of the artist selection, Forecast provided the CEZ with a list of pre-qualified artists for the festival’s fifth year.
A part of our role with Chroma Zone is to disrupt the mural festival status quo. In line with our values, we thoughtfully select and recommend artists through the lenses of racial and gender equity. To ensure that resources and talent are cultivated right here locally, we always aim to recommend and select a majority of local Minnesota artists. We are proud to continue to elevate and promote local artists from our rich community of muralists. Along with the CEZ, we also promote and ensure that creatives and artists always be paid fairly for their work. All selected artists in this festival are compensated for their work.
Jen Krava, Forecast Director of Programming, explains: “As a national organization that works with cities around the country, we helped start this festival with a concern that many mural festivals are more focused on priming capital markets than on building social capital among and between people, and that they continue to lag behind in ensuring full representation of BIPOC, women and non-binary artists.”
Many of the selected artists have previously received support from Forecast through grants and other programming, through our ongoing work supporting public artists with funding, training, and opportunities to create partnerships and advance their public art careers.
SELECTED ARTISTS
The final selection includes six Chroma Zone muralists. This year’s muralists are based in Minnesota, Colorado, Tennessee, and Argentina; half are women or non-binary artists, and the majority identify as BIPOC artists. Muralists are given walls and the freedom to explore themes and imagery that is meaningful to them. All festival artists retain creative control.
Mariela Ajras
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Read Mariela’s bio
Mariela Ajras is an Argentine visual artist and muralist. She holds a Bachelor of Psychology (UBA), training that has widely permeated the subject matter and sensitivity of her art. Her career as a large-scale muralist spans ten years and crosses contemporary topics: from the question of the female universe to the historical processes of memory construction and oblivion, always questioning the scope of art in public space with a gender perspective. She has carried out large-scale works in cities such as: Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Saint Paul, Oakland, Honolulu, San Diego, Lynn, Salem, Flint, Barcelona, Valencia, Tarragona, Salamanca, Naples, Louvain, Ciudad of Mexico, Guadalajara, Ciudad Juárez, Morelia, Bogotá, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires. She currently divides her work between international projects, collaborations with museums in the City, interventions with big brands and practice in her studio.
Danielle SeeWalker
Denver, Colorado
Read Danielle’s Bio
Danielle SeeWalker is a Húŋkpapȟa Lakȟóta citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux Nation in North Dakota. She is a mother, artist, writer, curator, activist, and businesswoman and currently based in Denver, Colorado since 2018. Her visual artwork often incorporates the use of mixed media and experimentation while incorporating traditional Native American materials, scenes, and messaging. Storytelling is an integral part of her artwork and pays homage to her identity as a Lakȟóta wíŋyaŋ as well as her passion for redirecting the narrative to an accurate and insightful representation of contemporary Native America while still acknowledging historical events.
Alongside her work as a visual artist, Danielle is a freelance writer and recently published her first book, titled “Still Here: A Past to Present Insight of Native American People & Culture.” She is also very dedicated to staying connected and involved in the Native American community and has served the past two years as Co-Chair for the Denver American Indian Commission. Through her work on the Commission, she has been able to be involved in several pieces of legislation that have directly affected her Native American community – including a law to abolish derogatory Native American mascots (2021) and to create an Office and Liaison for Missing & Murdered Indigenous Relatives (MMIR) investigations (2022 and 2023). Danielle considers herself an “artivist” as she can voice many important topics through her artwork and also be boots on the ground to make change happen.
Danielle has also been working on a long-term personal project since 2013 with her long-time friend called The Red Road Project. The focus of the work is to document, through words, photographs, and video, what it means to be Native American in the 21st century by capturing inspiring and positive stories of people and communities within Indian Country. She recently evolved that project into a non-profit organization with a division to provide cultural arts opportunities to Native American people residing in urban areas. She brings traditional art forms such as quillwork classes to her community to revive these dying art forms for a new generation.
Juliette Perine Myers
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Read Juliette’s bio
Juliette Perine Myers is a queer, mixed-race Chinese-American artist based out of south Minneapolis who has been creating public art, painted and mosaic murals, sculptures, and community art in the Twin Cities and surrounding metro since 2015. Her style is known for its dreamlike and whimsical qualities and often draws from her different identities, mythology, and elements found in nature. Most of her public artwork has been collaborative and rooted in collective healing through community engagement and storytelling. For example, she has worked with mosaic artist Lori Greene to create numerous mosaic murals and sculptures since 2018 with the help of other assistants and community volunteers, and she also helped form the activist-based mural collective, Creatives After Curfew, following the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Recently completed art projects include a mural in the Joyful World Mural Park at the Minnesota State Fair, the Stories of Womxn mosaic sculpture on Snelling and Lafond Ave. in St. Paul, and contributing to the mosaic panels for the Survivors Memorial on Boom Island, Minneapolis.
Xilam Balam
Saint Paul, Minnesota
Read Xilam’s bio
Xilam Balam (b. San Antonio, Texas and raised on the Eastside of Saint Paul) is an emerging multidisciplinary contemporary visual artist, muralist, ceramicist, and music producer whose work is a fusion of Pre-Columbian Indigenous art forms with contemporary hip-hop and graphic arts. He was a 2018 Mcknight Ceramics Fellow with a focus on ceramic instruments and masks, exhibiting at the Watermark Center in Bemidji, Minnesota. He works in a variety of media including music, ceramics, painting, digital design, screen-printing, stone carving, and epigraphy. His work as a musician has been highlighted in Chican@ Hip-Hop Nation: Politics of a New Millennial Mestizaje, The Source Magazine, and on TPT MN Original. He has performed across the country and in Mexico, producing, exhibiting, and teaching workshops locally. Balam is a co-founder and teaching artist with Electric Machete Studios, the Twin Cities Indigenous and Latinx art and music lab. His mural projects can be seen in Shoreview Library, El Colegio Charter School, Lake Street, Northeast Minneapolis, and in private residences.
Birdcap
Memphis, Tennessee
Read Birdcap’s bio
Michael Roy, a.k.a. Birdcap, grew up near the bayous of southern Mississippi, on America’s verdant “third coast”, a region battered by hurricanes and scarred by a violent, racist political history. Roy studied painting at Memphis College of Art but got his start as a muralist when he left the South and moved halfway across the world, where he became a part of the thriving street art scene in Seoul, South Korea. The character of “Birdcap” was born in South Korea. In the past decade, Birdcap’s career as a muralist has spanned continents, but the artist’s work is a product of the south, both a love letter to the region he calls home and a challenge to its problems. Birdcap works in a style equally steeped in Saturday morning cartoons and history paintings. He creates densely colored scenes that slide between references to Jim Henson and the Crossing of the Delaware. Using a vocabulary of fantastic shapes that make a Birdcap mural identifiable across the world, the artist takes up deeply personal subjects such as grief and loss, tackles political anxieties, and traverses a contemporary landscape both absurdly beautiful and troubled.
Jordan Hamilton
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Read Jordan’s Bio
Jordan Hamilton is a multi-disciplinary artist based in the Twin Cities. Bridging spirit aspirations & connections to earthly transformations & expressions – Jordan’s work reflects realities & explores cosmic & elemental energies through abstract & surrealist painting, murals, iconography, sculpture, collage, textile, mixed media & music. Jordan is a community/teaching artist, a founding member of the Power of Vision mural project & Creatives After Curfew mural collective, as well as a member of the Million Artist Movement & Voice of Culture. He is also the creator of Ancestral Aspects Adornment.
Birdcap (Memphis) | Security Building (West wall), 2395 University Avenue W, Saint Paul 55114
About this mural | Flowers for the Friends Who Picked Me Up
“This mural depicts one character (top left) helping their friend (bottom right) up off of the ground. That’s what my friends did for me. So this is my chance to give them their flowers (sprinkled throughout). The phoenix (top middle) notoriously burns itself out and comes back from their own ashes. It’s a great sentiment. But the moments where I start back new almost always involve the outstretched arms of my friends.
(This mural is dedicated to Sydney G James, who painted an incredible mural for me here in Saint Paul, to which I felt the need to return the gesture as best I could.)”
—Birdcap
Juliette Perine Myers (Minneapolis) | Roundtable Coffee Works (West wall) 2386 Territorial Rd, Saint Paul, MN 55114
About this mural | The Horrors Persist But So Do I
“The mural depicts my interpretation of the Chinese wood dragon with a solar eclipse in totality. In the Chinese lunar calendar, 2024 is the year of the wood dragon which symbolizes regrowth, renewal, vitality, and abundance. In the design, I draw from elements of my own Chinese ancestry to capture this concept by incorporating imagery of botanicals, seeds, butterflies, and mushrooms sprouting all around it to symbolize the essence of the wood dragon. I painted a solar eclipse to the left as another time-marker for 2024, and because a solar eclipse can be a symbol for renewal and a positive radical shift. The title is “The Horrors Persist But So Do I” to speak to the state of the world that we are currently in; extreme polarity, corruption, genocide… The mural is a symbol of hope to keep persisting, resisting, and fighting for justice and peace.”
—Juliette Perine Myers
Danielle SeeWalker (Denver) | Mpls-St Paul Building (East wall) 2429 University Ave W., Saint Paul, MN 55114
About this mural | DAKHOTA ANCESTORS
“I loved painting my signature “we are our ancestors” faces but surrounded by Dakota floral. It’s a homage to the beautiful Dakota people that have stewarded these lands since forever. So many places are named after Native languages and I bet most don’t even know.
Minnesota = Mni Sota is the land of clear water or a translation that the Dakota refer to as: “the land where the water reflects the skies.”
—Danielle SeeWalker
Xilam Bilam (Saint Paul) | 711 Vandalia St, Saint Paul, MN 55114
About this mural | Luna Llena
Jordan Hamilton (Minneapolis) | Hampden Park Co-op (North wall)
928 Raymond Avenue, Saint Paul, MN 55114
About this mural | Ubuntu (I Am Because We Are)
“Our humanity lies in our collectiveness. The visual language of this mural heavily features Adinkra symbols that come from the Akan people of present Ghana. These symbols have become adopted by many within the global African diaspora. The Nkyinkyim symbol in the first doorway represents initiative, dynamism, and versatility…it signifies the twisted path of life’s journey that requires we be resilient to navigate through the twists & turns. The Nkonsonkonson symbol in the second doorway means ‘chain link.’ It is a symbol of unity, human relations, responsibility, interdependence & community. Other symbolism includes signifiers of the peace we strive towards, strength & balance, four directions & the importance of lived experience transferring into knowledge. Desmond Tutu said: ‘My humanity is bound up in yours for we can only be human together.’ STRENGTH IN UNITY • RESTORE HUMANITY • PEACE & PROTECTION”
– Jordan Hamilton
(651) 641-1128
INFO@FORECAST
