Chroma Zone 2026
A community with strong relationships, continuing to disrupt the mural festival status quo
All murals located in Saint Paul, Minnesota’s Creative Enterprise Zone. Scroll down for more photos and artist statements.
We’re excited to continue being part of Chroma Zone Mural and Art Festival in 2026 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 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 73 murals in the Zone by 82 artists, 73% by local artists, 74% by BIPOC artists, and 50% by women or non-binary artists.
FORECAST’S ROLE
A Community with strong relationships
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.
“What makes Chroma Zone so special isn’t just the paint and the murals,” explains Theresa Sweetland, Executive Director at Forecast. “It’s the stronger relationships built between people in the Saint Paul community. As co-founders, we’re proud of a festival where artists have real creative freedom, where the diversity of our city is celebrated with pride, and where local talent and creativity thrive. It’s a place where nationally and internationally renowned artists also want to make their mark on this great community. Shout out to a neighborhood that sees public art as essential to civic life.”
Over the years, 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/teams. This year’s muralists are based in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Washington, and California; 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.
This year’s Chroma Zone muralists are from California, Washington, Wisconsin, and Minnesota and are chosen by festival co-founders Forecast Public Art and Burlesque of North America:
- Daniela Bianchini (Minneapolis, MN) @dani_db_mosaicsarg
- D. Guzman (Twin Cities, MN) @dtheartista
- Sharon Liú (Minneapolis, MN) @__liusiyu
- El Mac (Los Angeles, CA) @mac_arte, in collaboration with Cyfi (Minneapolis, MN) @cyfione
- Flahn Manly (Minneapolis, MN) @flahnmanly
- Stevie Shao (Seattle, WA) @stepfrae
Additionally, Twin Cities-based graffiti and street artists will paint during a two-day Chroma Zone Alley Jam on Friday & Saturday during the festival. Find the artist lineup.
D Guzman
Twin Cities, Minnesota
dtheartista.com
Read D’s Bio
D Guzmán (she/her) is a Mexican-American illustrator and muralist based in the Twin Cities. Guzmán works digitally with her emotional support iPad mini and is primarily interested in kidlit, product/package illustration, and mural work. Guzman loves to include pieces of her everyday life and culture in her work. Her illustrations balance graphic simplicity with a warmth handcrafted feel with folk-art influences. Guzmán’s work contains botanical motifs, women of color/BIPOC with a warm palette, textural elements, and sometimes a sprinkle of rótulos-inspired lettering.
Dani B.
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Read Dani’s bio
Daniela Bianchini is a public artist. She has dedicated her practice to public art for over a decade. It is her passion to create work for public spaces to beautify and to add cultural value to the world. Daniela has studied under prestigious artists and has fallen in love with mosaics. Her work is often site-specific, interpreting and representing the communities and environments that surround it. She has worked as a solo artist and in teams with different artists creating public art. A lot of her work has involved community engagement and teaching the art of mosaics to hundreds of people of all ages. Daniela is originally from Argentina and has lived and worked in and around Minnesota for the past 26 years.
Flahn Manly
Minneapolis, Minnesota
flahnmanly.com
Read Flahn’s bio
Flahn Manly is a Liberian native raised in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. As an artist he is focused on freedom, hope, and social transformation. He creates engaging bodies of work that elicit love, light, and positivity, bringing people of all walks of life together. He believes deeply that unity creates change. For him, it is vital that we leave the world more colorful than we found it, and art is one of the most powerful ways to do so. As a contemporary artist specializing in figurative painting with a concentration on portraiture, he works extensively with both oil and acrylic mediums to capture the beauty, strength, and resilience of people of color. His practice centers on creating imagery that reflects shared humanity. Through rich, layered textures and vibrant color, he aims to build connection, inspire hope, and honor the communities that shape his story.
Sharon Liu
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Read Sharon’s bio
Sharon Liú is a Twin Cities–based oil painter working in figurative painting and portraiture, classically trained at the China Academy of Fine Art in Hangzhou, a city built around the still waters of West Lake. She has since made her home in Minnesota, drawn to the same lakes and quiet wilderness she came to know beside West Lake, a personal throughline of water and landscape between two places she calls home. Liú’s portraits center her own mixed-race family, painted and repainted as she searches for a way to hold her children’s, and her own, experience of identity across two cultures.
Trained in the classical tradition of Rembrandt, Van Dyck, and Caravaggio, she has spent recent years pushing that technical rigor toward color and story, most notably in her ongoing series “iNovel,” which turns a decade of family photographs into small, intimate oil paintings aiming, as she puts it, to make “the most personal… the most universal.” Her work has been shown at Rosalux Gallery, SOOVAC, and the Minnesota State Fair Fine Art Competition, and in 2023 she founded Artlet26, a teaching studio for kids in the Twin Cities.
Stevie Shao
Seattle, Washington
stevieshao.com
Read Stevie’s bio
Stevie Shao is a Seattle-born and raised artist and muralist whose work draws inspiration from a rich history of folk art in the Pacific Northwest and her Chinese American background. Shao’s paintings depict real and folkloric imagery in site-specific collaborations that share in the mysticism of the natural world. Working in a variety of acrylic paints and swaths of color and pattern, she reinforces an environment constantly in motion and filled with symbolism. She is most interested in myth-making – reimagining Asian art sensibilities in unexpected and contemporary settings, often as large-scale public-facing works. Stevie’s work is created to advance the conversation between people and the land they inhabit, and to celebrate all the stories they can tell about it. Since her start in 2020, Shao has quickly gained international acclaim, showing with galleries around the world, collaborating with global brands, and painting vibrant, large-scale murals worldwide.
EL MAC
Los Angeles, California
elmac.net
Read EL MAC’s bio
EL MAC (Miles MacGregor) is an internationally renowned artist born and based in Los Angeles. He began painting both smaller indoor works as well as public murals and graffiti in Phoenix in the mid 1990s, and since that time has developed his unique visual aesthetic and rendering style which utilizes repeating contour patterns. His work draws on influences from classical European art, social realism, symbolism and devotional art, as well as the Chicano and Mexican culture he grew up around. He is best known for his meticulous paintings and large-scale murals exploring feminine beauty and honoring ordinary, overlooked, or marginalized people. He has been commissioned to paint all over the world, for museums, universities and other cultural institutions, including the Groeninge Museum (Belgium), San José Museum of Art (California), Northeastern University (Boston), University of California (San Diego), QAGoMA (Brisbane), Fondazione PRADA (Italy), and the Mexican secretariat of Foreign Affairs, as well as murals in Belgium, Cambodia, Cuba, Denmark, England, Germany, Ireland, Morocco, Puerto Rico, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, and Viet Nam. For over twenty years he has aimed “to uplift and inspire through careful, perfectionist renderings of both the sublime and the humble”.
Rock "Cyfi" Martinez (with El Mac)
Minneapolis, Minnesota
cyfiart.com
Read CYFI’s bio
Rock ‘‘CYFI’’ Martinez is an International Aerosol Artist with over 20 years of experience painting large surfaces, commercial buildings, and private spaces. From commissions to relevant public tributes, Rock brings creative solutions to neighborhoods around the United States. Working across cultural boundaries of the challenges communities face today, Rock brightens city streets with his larger-than-life murals. His skills are known for pushing ideas to extremes and unlocking public art awareness. Rock is based in Minneapolis with studios in the Twin Cities and Tucson, AZ.
Are you looking for Jon King aka The Gingbeard? While Jon was going to paint for this year’s Chroma Zone festival, he had to postpone.
We hope to host this talented muralist at a future festival.
Stevie Shao (Seattle, Washington) | on the Southwest corner facing the alley
1919 University Ave W., Saint Paul
About this mural | Title pending
“This is based on a drawing from the past year titled ‘Next to You,’ and it depicts a snake and a tiger facing one another—they have opposing qualities and complement one another physically and through their characteristics. Snakes are cunning, quiet, and symbolize transformation and intuition. Tigers are fierce, powerful, and resilient. They are an unlikely pair but together, unstoppable. To me, this drawing symbolizes the balance of qualities in us as individuals, and the understanding we can reach between one another by understanding our different strengths.”
Sharon Liu (Minneapolis, MN)
807 N. Hampden Ave , Saint Paul
About this mural | Reflections We Carry
“This work began with two landscapes that have become connected in my memory: Hangzhou, China, where I went to art school, and the Boundary Waters in Minnesota.
Hangzhou is a city shaped by its relationship to water, particularly West Lake. Years later, the lakes, rocks, trees, and shifting horizon of the Boundary Waters unexpectedly brought me back to that landscape. The two places are geographically and culturally distant, yet in my memory they have begun to overlap.
Throughout the mural, images appear in pairs and fragments. The swans come from Hangzhou and the deer from the Boundary Waters. Both appear as pairs, while the two girls—my daughters—occupy separate spaces. I think about this as a reflection on sisterhood: two people can share a history, a family, and a landscape while remaining entirely individual.
At the center, a hand holds a phone against the Boundary Waters landscape. Growing up in China during a period of rapid industrialization, air pollution was a familiar part of my experience. After moving to the United States, I came to think of a place as remote as the Boundary Waters as its opposite—distance, wilderness, clean air. Increasingly, wildfire smoke and changing climate conditions have complicated that perception. The same red and purple AQI warnings I remember from my childhood can now appear over a landscape I once imagined as protected by its remoteness.
At the same time, the China I remember is not a fixed place. It has changed tremendously, just as my understanding of the Boundary Waters has changed. The two places I once understood as environmental opposites no longer feel so far apart.
The mural is built from separate images—Hangzhou and Minnesota, swans and deer, sister and sister, memory and present, screen and landscape. Each occupies its own frame, yet none remains completely separate. Air moves across borders. Water connects territories. Memory carries one landscape into another.
I am interested in this contradiction: a world that has become increasingly connected, while we continue to experience it through boundaries—geographic, cultural, familial, and personal.”
D the Artista (Twin Cities, MN)
829 Vandalia St., Saint Paul (on the east side of the building facing Vandalia at Ellis St)
About this mural | Las Raíces No Se Olvidan
“’Roots are never forgotten’
Las raices no se olvidan is a mural based on many Latino immigrant family journeys and inspired mostly by my own background. With the ICE Metro Surge at the beginning of the year, I refocused my perspective and remembered the main reason for my art career stems from my immigrant parents. They made everything in my life and career possible. The mural can start at any end but I like to start off at the very far right end. The feathered serpent is Quetzalcoatl. He remains an iconic symbol of Mexican cultural identity. A god of wisdom, wind, and creation who brought agriculture and knowledge to humanity.
Ahead of the serpent is an agave plant to represent the agave fields from Jalisco where both my parents and their parents were born and raised, followed by some corn stalks to represent life, sacred ancestry, and national identity. ‘Sin maíz no hay país’ – But ironically, my parents also immigrated to Iowa, ‘fields of opportunities’ and corn fields. Many immigrant families come to the U.S. for a better life, opportunities, and to escape terror in their homeland.
The house with different rooms represents an immigrant household and their struggles as children of immigrant parents. As an eldest daughter myself, the issues and responsibilities were too much of a burden to handle on my own. From translating important documents to becoming a third parent to my siblings. The older I got, I started to heal myself and my inner child. (Giant girl on the phone with her mom holding a full color orange little girl representing her inner child).
Latinos are very Catholic and the Virgin Mary has always been a huge symbolic icon in our religion as well as our culture. My on and off relationship with my religion represents the missing Virgin Mary, with only her light appearing as a reminder that she is still very much alive in my life through culture and less than my religion.
The family portrait, is just that. An immigrant family portrait, my own version of American Gothic.
Followed by the text that translates ‘roots are never forgotten,’ surrounded with 50 stars to represent the American dream. I have my own opinion with the United States but to my mom and dad this country has given them everything their homeland couldn’t. And it is an everyday battle of appreciation and disappointment at the same time.”
Flahn Manly (Minneapolis, MN)
711 Vandalia St., Saint Paul (on the Southwest side facing Vandalia)
About this mural | Na Foe
“Na Foe, we called it Knock Foot, was how we passed the hours after school. You could play it anywhere: a bare patch of dirt, a porch, the space between two houses.
It’s a bit like Rock, Paper, Scissors, except your whole body is in the game, closer to Double Dutch, really. You clap, you jump, and in that split second between jumps you have to read your opponent’s feet before they move. Guess wrong and you’re out. Guess right and the game speeds up.
Do it long enough with a good opponent and it stops looking like a game at all. The clapping, the jumping, the quick feet, it turns into a dance. It’s a simple game, but it carries the joy, creativity, and spirit of growing up in Liberia.”
Daniela Bianchini (Minneapolis, MN)
2336 W. Territorial Rd., Saint Paul (at Territorial Rd and Carleton St.)
About this mural | Moments That Matter
“This mural celebrates the simple yet profound act of being together—in community, among friends, and in shared moments of connection. It is an invitation to pause the relentless pace of everyday life, to set aside schedules and expectations, and to make space for conversation, presence, and belonging.
In a world where time feels increasingly scarce, and our lives are carefully programmed and managed, choosing to slow down and share time with one another becomes a meaningful act. Likewise, in an era when we are more digitally connected than ever yet often feel disconnected in our daily lives, celebrating community gatherings and genuine human connection is more important than ever.
This mural reminds us that time spent together does not need to be productive to be valuable. The shared moments of friendship, trust, laughter, and presence are not distractions from life—they are among its greatest gifts. It is within these ordinary moments that we nurture our sense of belonging, strengthen our communities, and support our collective well-being.
Furthermore, this mural is a celebration of women and the bonds they share. It honors the quiet strength found in friendship, the ways women uplift and rely on one another, and the profound sense of belonging that grows through shared experiences. It reflects the joy, comfort, and deep nourishment of gathering together—the kind of connection that touches the soul and reminds us that we are never meant to navigate life alone.”
EL MAC + CYFI (Los Angeles, CA, and Minneapolis, MN)
2327 Wycliff Street, Saint Paul (on the northwest side of the building facing Wycliff Street)
About this mural | title pending
“EL MAC x CYFI are collaborating on a mural celebrating young people, diversity, belonging, and the limitless potential of the next generation. At the center of the composition is a young girl looking directly at the viewer with her hands raised, an image of confidence, possibility, and agency. Behind her, a close-up kaleidoscope of monarch butterflies creates an almost stained-glass effect, surrounding her with color, movement, and light. The monarch’s migration becomes a metaphor for resilience, transformation, and the journeys that connect people and communities across borders.
Rather than focusing on division, the work centers belonging and shared humanity, giving young people a reflection of themselves as valued, visible, and capable of shaping the future. The butterflies represent the beauty created when many individual lives, cultures, and identities come together, reinforcing the message that our differences are not something to fear, but an essential part of a strong and vibrant community.”
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