If you ride the Red Line, you may have noticed a new blue and black mural emerging on the side of one of the new buildings between NoMa and Union Station this week. Created by artist Trav, the piece is just one of 16 new murals going up as part of the Pow! Wow! DC festival in NoMa.
“This is cool. It’s a real challenge,” says Trav during a break from work on his painting on the wall of the 13-story 100K Apartments at the corner of First and K streets NE. Based in Los Angeles, his inspiration comes from a variety of urban images, including old commercial signage and typology, he says.
A few blocks away in a yard on Patterson Street between North Capitol and First streets NE, Eamon Gillen is working on a mural that draws from his background as a tattoo artist and the Smiley Face invented by Harvey Ball in his home of Worcester, Massachusetts.
“There’s meaning somewhere, but I’m just going to let people figure it out themselves,” he says of his composition that includes a smiley face riding atop an eagle mid-flight.
Trav and Gillen are just two of the artists participating in Pow! Wow! DC’s fourth year covering blank walls in and around NoMa with art. The festival brings a curated group of local and out-of-town talent to the neighborhood to paint pretty much whatever they want, with three caveats: no nudity, violence or politics, says Pow! Wow! DC festival director and artist Kelly Towles.
Pow! Wow!’s roots can be traced to Hawaii in 2010, where founder Jasper Wong set about creating impactful art that would grab the attention of Honolulu residents. The festival is now global, with artists painting walls and blank spaces in at least 13 cities worldwide from Hong Kong to Tel Aviv to Long Beach, Calif.
The festival aims to beautify the neighborhoods where it takes place. NoMa, which has boomed since the opening of the NoMa-Gallaudet Metro station opened in 2004, provides artists with plenty of potential canvases on the many new—and sometimes sterile—walls that have risen in recent years.
“Pow! Wow! fills a lot of these blocks of bland spaces with creative pieces of artwork,” says Galin Brooks, vice president of planning and economic development for the NoMa Business Improvement District, which helps facilitate the festival in DC.
The works add texture to a neighborhood that, when the festival began in the District in 2016, largely lacked art and public space. That has since changed, driven by $50 million in city funds that the NoMa Parks Foundation has invested in lighting installations in the L and M street underpasses, Swampoodle Park at 3rd and L streets, and the in-progress Alethia Tanner Park adjacent to the Metropolitan Branch Trail at R Street.
The MBT is one of the most visible places for Pow! Wow! murals in NoMa. Local artists Mixed Scene, Rodrigo Pradel, and Tracie Ching are among the seven painting over past festival murals—impermanence is a tenet of Pow! Wow! says Towles—on the Metro wall along the trail this year.
Sarah Jane Jamison, a resident of Deanwood, has created a work on the MBT that features a chat box that asks “Is this a mural?” She says she wants her piece to be both bright and relatable, drawing imagery from the Instagram “like” icon and Pikachu.
Towles, who selects the artists himself, brings both newcomers like Jamison and veterans to NoMa for the festival. For example, Pow! Wow! veteran Trav was given the high profile wall facing the Red Line in part because of his experience painting large murals.
For his part, Trav is excited about the opportunity to display his work on such a prominent wall. According to the NoMa BID, roughly 100,000 passengers ride trains past the building every day.
“That’s a huge selling point—you look for things like rail lines in graffiti,” Trav says of the location.
