Chroma Zone 2025 artists, continuing to disrupt the mural festival status quo
All murals located in Saint Paul, Minnesota’s Creative Enterprise Zone
We’re excited to continue being part of Chroma Zone Mural and Art Festival in 2025 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 nearly 30 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 65 murals in the Zone, 75% by local artists, 77% by BIPOC artists, and 50% 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 on 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 sixth 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 eight Chroma Zone muralists. This year’s muralists are based in Minnesota, Colorado, and Argentina; half are women or non-binary 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.
Biafra
Twin Cities, Minnesota
Read Biafra’s Bio
Biafra or Biafra Inc. is a multifaceted artist from the Twin Cities who uses a variety of mediums, including spray paint, screen printing, stencils, stickers, and posters. His early beginnings came from an interest in skateboarding and punk rock, which pushed him into stencils and graffiti in 2003 and then into screen printing and more traditional painting in 2007. He holds a BFA from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities with an emphasis in printmaking. His work is both personal and political. Biafra’s art is a visual retelling of experiences, people and stories that are a part of his life.
Anna Charney
Denver, Colorado
Read Anna’s bio
Anna Charney is a painter and muralist of abstract and illusionistic pattern works. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting/drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has been living and working back in her hometown of Denver, Colorado since 2016. Starting that year, Charney expanded her practice from only paintings and installations to murals and public art. Her contemporary practice ranges from smaller acrylic works on canvas, to detailed interior installation pieces, to massive sides of buildings and public structures.
Charney’s contemporary paintings and murals are inspired by mathematical patterns found in nature, and characterized by their illusionistic spaces, vibrancy, and dense layering of detail. She has exhibited in galleries and painted murals across the United States in Alaska, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Utah and internationally in Costa Rica, France and The United Kingdom.
Mike Davis
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Read Mike’s bio
Mike Davis is an acclaimed graphic artist and co-owner of award-winning Twin Cities-based creative studio Burlesque of North America. Bred on a steady diet of Atari, rap music, Star Wars, Transformers, skateboarding, graffiti, and international food packaging, Mike went on to formally study graphic design before moving to Minneapolis to work with the team at Life Sucks Die magazine to form Burlesque.
After years of being involved in St. Louis’ graffiti scene in the 1990s, Mike helped start Paint Louis, an annual festival attracting dozens of graffiti artists from across the globe to paint on what is now known at the Mural Mile. Years later, he and Wes Winship from Burlesque joined Forecast Public Art and the Creative Enterprise Zone to launch the Chroma Zone Mural & Art Festival in 2019.
As a graphic designer and part of Burlesque, Mike has completed numerous projects for a wide range of clients including X-Games, UFC, Nike Sportswear, 3M, Chromeo, Red Bull, World Street Kitchen, Minnesota Public Radio, Modist Brewing, and Dual Citizen Brewing.
Xena Goldman
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Read Xena’s bio
Xena Goldman is a Minneapolis-based muralist, painter, illustrator, and educator from the Chicago area. The bold colors, exaggerated portrait features, and blurred lines between realism and fantasy in her work are heavily inspired by her experience with neurodivergence and sensory processing problems. Growing up, these undiagnosed conditions led to profound overwhelm, which Xena learned to channel into art and poetry. In 2019, she had the privilege of participating in a mural apprenticeship program, and immediately fell in love with this large format, fitting for such big emotions that extend across the wall; loud, emotional, and unwilling to be contained. In the past 5 years, she has painted/participated in nearly two dozen murals in the US, Cuba, and Colombia.
Inspired by her experience as an educator for over 10 years, as well as her unique brain chemistry and learning styles, Xena is also extremely passionate about utilizing comics as educational tools. She has sold and distributed thousands of educational zines to over 38 states and across the globe.
Cadex Herrera
Saint Paul, Minnesota
Read Cadex’s Bio
Cadex Herrera is a multidisciplinary artist originally from Belize. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Communication Design from the College of Visual Arts and a master’s in secondary education. Cadex currently teaches Fine Arts at Creative Arts Secondary School in the Saint Paul Public School District, where he instructs students in traditional art disciplines such as drawing, painting, sculpture, ceramics, and illustration, as well as media arts, including photography and filmmaking.
As an arts educator and public artist, he has collaborated with institutions like the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Institute of Art, and White Bear Center for the Arts, alongside educational organizations such as the University of Minnesota, Augsburg University, and St. Thomas. His community-based work includes projects with organizations like CLUES, Amherst Wilder Foundation, Ameriprise, and Medtronic, as well as public art initiatives in Eden Prairie, Brooklyn Center, Red Wing, and Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Cadex’s artistic practice focuses on amplifying the voices of marginalized communities, including immigrants, people of color, and underserved groups. He believes art is a vital tool for storytelling, cultural celebration, and fostering social consciousness. Through murals, installations, and participatory projects, Cadex aims to inspire pride, belonging, and transformation within the spaces and communities his work engages.
Pablo Kalaka
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Read Kalaka’s Bio
Painter, muralist and illustrator. Chilean by birth (1975) and Venezuelan by upbringing. Pablo Kalaka has a degree in Literature from the Central University of Venezuela (1998) and studied illustration and graphic art at the Escola de Comics Joso, in Barcelona, Spain (2002-2004). In his more than 20 years of muralist career, he has painted murals in the US, Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Argentina, Chile, Spain, France and Germany. He has participated in several festivals and art meetings and made some individual exhibitions. He is periodically cocreating public art with the mosaic artist Daniela Bianchini in Minneapolis, MN, where he resides, since 2021, and he has made almost 20 murals in the Twin cities so far. He is now the cofounder of DAKA STUDIO, together with Daniela.
He made the artwork for the book Corazón de niña, written by the Spanish singer and composer Amparo Sánchez, and published by ECOVAL Publishing House in 2023. This same year he published the illustrated book Son de estos mares, an illustrated book for children of which he is the author.
Christina Vang
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Read Christina’s Bio
Christina Vang (she/her) is a Hmong American graphic designer, illustrator, and painter based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. From murals that scale buildings across the Twin Cities and beyond to the finely tuned design projects she delivers through her creative studio, La Bang, her work vibrates with vivid color and dynamic, culturally inspired forms.
Christina’s love of public art spans back to her youth. It is rooted in the vibrant tribal textiles of the Hmong culture, her connection to stories and the written word, and Hip Hop culture. After a decade of working in advertising, she founded La Bang Studio in 2016 to make design more accessible to the community, grassroots organizations, and small businesses by focusing on trust, value alignment, and relationship building as much as craft.
Christina aims to bring visibility to work rooted in cultural identity and social justice through design. She has partnered with groups such as the Women’s Foundation of Minnesota, Mixed Blood Theater, Loft Literary Center, Coalition of Asian American Leaders, Southeast Asian Resource Action Center, the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, Institute for Agriculture & Trade Policy, Ua Si Creative, and John Michael Kohler Arts Center.
Mariela Ajras (Buenos Aires, Argentina) | The Wycliff (South wall)
2327 Wycliff Street, Saint Paul, MN 55114
About this mural | Golden Threads (Triptych)
“This site-specific mural was conceived as an emotional triptych on grief, where the bond between mother and child becomes a space to reflect on loss, memory, and the enduring nature of love.
Each panel depicts a gesture interrupted by absence: in the first [painted in 2019], a mother embraces a son who is no longer there; in the second, the son embraces a missing mother. Only in the final panel do they come together. This image—impossible or imagined—pushes the palette toward heightened saturation, an intensity that does not aim for realism, but rather exposes the fantasized nature of the moment. That chromatic excess reveals the scene as a repairing image: one that may not have happened in life, but becomes necessary in the symbolic processing of grief.
The absent figures are rendered through a gold glitch effect, a fragmented and luminous texture that represents what is irretrievable: that which is gone, but still leaves a trace. This visual technique makes grief’s paradox visible—the coexistence of what is no longer and what remains—and suggests that to love is also to hold on to what is missing.
The triptych does not tell a linear story; instead, it evokes a recurring emotional impulse: the longing to touch again, to preserve, to conjure what was lost. Immersed in a dense atmosphere of greens, golds, and skin tones, the mural becomes a ritual in paint—where love persists, even when the body cannot. A visual meditation on the kind of love that endures, even as everything else changes.”
Mariela’s Chroma Zone murals:
Chroma Zone Mural #2 Motherhood and Migration, 2019
Chroma Zone Murals #61 and #64 Golden Thread (Triptych), 2025.
Biafra (Twin Cities) | The Wycliff (north facing, parking lot)
2327 Wycliff Street, Saint Paul
About this mural | Title Pending
“My tallest mural to date is now up in St Paul. Thanks to @chromazonefest and @thewycliff for letting me paint this year. I’ve been hoping to get a reading lady in the CEZ for the last 6 years so it’s fun to finally get her in there.
My original 2019 Chroma Zone mural, titled ‘Daydreamer,’ was a picture of a woman sleeping in a pile of books that stretched across the wall I had been given for the event. The original drawing didn’t pan out, but since then I have fixated on getting that image into the Creative Enterprise Zone (CEZ). When the first Chroma Zone festival happened, I had been working in the CEZ for 6 years prior and was very familiar with the area. To me, that original drawing was representative of the area at the time; it was kind of a sleepy industrial area that nobody was paying attention to, but it was full of potential and possibility.
Over the last 6 years, the CEZ has changed. That possibility and potential that I had in mind on the first wall is being realized, and it is becoming something new and creative. It’s not a sleepy area anymore; people are moving in, people are going on tours. It’s growing. As I was working on the drawing for this wall, I realized that my sleeping lady didn’t represent the area in the way that she did 6 years ago. I decided it was time for a change, too. She is no longer asleep, she is awake, she is learning, and she is growing, just like the area that surrounds her.”
A huge thank you to my good friends @cxxiiapparel, @charleshmm, and @wundr for helping me with my wild, self-imposed deadline, and a big thank you to my friends @cyfione and @brandikoleart for sending snacks down through their studio window.”
Mike Davis (Minneapolis) | Retaining wall (South facing)
Charles Street at Raymond Avenue, Saint Paul
About this mural | Untitled
“I don’t have a title, and I’m not sure if I need one, but the idea comes from the wall owner suggesting planting ivy to take over the wall to thwart any graffiti in the future.
The more I thought about it, I kept returning to the notion that ivy, plants, and other nature will outlive all of us. It was here millions of years before us and will be here millions of years after we’re gone.
Manmade objects—phones, weapons, jewels, and even artwork—will all be consumed by nature one day… and maybe that’s not such a bad thing.”
Cadex Herrera (Saint Paul, originally from Belize)
807 N. Hampden Avenue, Saint Paul
About this mural |‘Pitzik’ Q’ij: Courts of the Sun
Pitzik’ (peet zeek Key eh): Mayan word for the ballgame
Q’ij: “sun” in K’iche,’ symbolizing life, rebirth, and the cosmic cycle
“This mural honors Pok ta Pok, the ancient Mayan ballgame, where it symbolizes the struggle between life and death. Once a sacred ritual and political stage, the game is now revived in Belize as a living tradition of survival and pride. The mural creates a space of belonging, connecting people across the Americas to Maya indigenous roots, and carrying forward the strength, memory, and resilience of a culture that endures.”
Pablo Kalaka (Minneapolis) | Bro-Tex, Inc. (West Wall)
800 N. Hampden Avenue, Saint Paul
About this mural |Si solo fuera yo un pájaro (If Only I Were a Bird)
“Nuevo mural hecho para el Festival de arte mural CHROMAZONE, de la ciudad de Saint Paul.
El mural se llama: Si solo fuera yo un pájaro (título robado a una canción que le escuché a Sangeat García). Sobre migraciones y fronteras.
Gracias a la organización del Festival por esa increíble buena vibra para todo.
New mural created for the CHROMAZONE Mural Art Festival in Saint Paul.
The mural is called If Only I Were a Bird (a title borrowed from a song I heard from Sangeat García). It’s about migration and borders.
Thanks to the festival organizers for the incredible positive vibes.”
Xena Goldman (Minneapolis)
2228 W. Territorial Road, Saint Paul
About this mural | Mimosa Pudica
“This piece is inspired by sensory overwhelm, which is why the subject is wearing sunglasses (for bright lights), covering their ears (for loud sounds), and wearing gloves (for tactile overwhelm). The rain represents the intensity of sensory input, and the tiny drink umbrella represents accommodations, which help but often fall short of protecting the overwhelmed person.
The plant that is superimposed on the subject is called ‘Mimosa Pudica’ (the intended title of the mural), also known as the ‘sensitive plant,’ which closes its leaves for self-protection when touched. The subject’s position, folded inward, is also an expression of that.”
Christina Vang (Minneapolis)
2340 Capp Road, Saint Paul
About this mural | Dancing Queens
“I wanted to do something that felt joyful and dynamic. As I created these distinct characters, I thought of self-expression, celebrating individuality, and the power of moving together—not just in dance, but in all aspects of life.
The dance moves are fun, the fashion is fun, and I hope people come across it and break out into spontaneous dance.
The vibrant colors are a throughline in all of my work and are influenced by the bold, neon, multi-colored patterns found in Hmong textiles. Tigers are referred to as spirits and ancestors in our culture, so the tiger stripes appear in a lot of my recent work.
I’ve also incorporated other Hmong textiles, such as the long pink sash in the fourth character, which is tied around the waist in traditional Hmong clothing. The fifth character’s clothes will feature a floral Thai pattern that is commonly found in Hmong garments.”
Anna Charney (Denver)
Midway Triangle Building
2500 University Avenue W, Saint Paul
About this mural | untitled
“….. I used spray paint for the first time and in one fell swoop all my plans got knocked around. I knew nothing about murals at the time, but was making very large paintings and had an interest in installation work. I had offered to volunteer at a local mural festival in order to learn more about scaling up my work onto buildings and about spray paint as a medium (keep in mind I had just come from a highly institutionalized art school where anything graffiti-related was very much not on the table for serious art making). I was given my first wall that week and from there, my becoming from artist to muralist as well was immediate and unquestionable. I had the distinct feeling that “this is IT”, even though I’d had that feeling with painting my whole life, this was even louder and more enthusiastic. I had to listen.”
“I think that what sets me apart from many other artists or muralists is my distinct style and imagery. The most important thing is to stand out and my work is extremely unique, contemporary and up to interpretation by the viewer (which lends itself well to a lot of public art spaces as abstract work isn’t alienating to any group). I have taken to describing my style as “digital taffy”. I am interested in optical art and systems of illusions. Each painting or mural consists of many flowing and bending forms, which are primarily made up of enlarged halftone dot patterns, vortex configurations, or heavily distorted shapes that make up anamorphic illusions from a specific viewpoint. My work could be considered as abstract, geometric, or graphic and lends itself to great discovery and interpretation by any viewer.”
– Excerpts from “Meet Anna Charney” online profile at CANVASREBEL.com
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