Before the shuttered Wendy’s at “Dave Thomas Circle” in Northeast D.C. gets razed, it’s getting a facelift from DC Walls.

All four sides of the Wendy’s — from corner to corner, top to bottom — will be transformed from its Wendy’s-brand colors of brown brick, beige and maroon, into a colorful work of public art starting next month.

Formerly known as Pow! Wow!, the annual DC Walls mural festival transforms buildings and walls into canvases. Launched in 2016, the festival installs the art throughout Northeast D.C., with the main mural thoroughfare placed along the Metropolitan Branch Trail (MBT) on the wall that divides the Metro tracks from the new Alethia Tanner Park. Each year, new murals are painted on that wall; other murals painted as part of the project often stay up for years.

The 2022 festival includes 18 artists: eight local, including DC Walls founder Kelly Towles, Nicole Bourgea, Rik Holden, and others; and 10 visiting from as far away as Istanbul and Paris. The team working on the former Wendy’s is a couple from Los Angeles who go by the names TRAV and EMJAY; TRAV has participated in DC Walls before. “They’re gonna 360 it,” says Towles of the plan to wrap up the entire building in a mural.

“I honestly have no idea on the actual square footage or the amount of paint needed [for the project],” TRAV tells DCist in an email. TRAV, who doesn’t publicize his full name, says they’ll need to be “very strategic” about how they’ll use the paint. “[I’ll] do my best to fill in the bulk with large industrial sprayers and leave the spray paint for the more detailed sections.”

Towles, who hand-picks all the artists, gives them almost total freedom in the design as long as there’s no nudity, no violence and no politics, says Towles; those are his only conditions. That freedom to paint whatever inspires the artists is what draws them in, he says. DC Walls is an all volunteer production, so the artists are not paid to paint from dawn to dusk for 10 days as part of the festival. Paint supplies and equipment — including scaffolding and mechanical lifts — are donated or paid for by sponsors, including the NoMa Business Improvement District (BID), NPR, citizenM hotels, Dolcezza Gelato, and others. The walls are donated by property owners and businesses.

“I say, ‘Hey, I love your work, come in and help beautify our city. No boundaries … it just has to beautify the community. It has to be for everyone, not just for one select avenue.’ And that’s a real open book for a lot of artists,” says Towles, who has painted murals as part of the event in past years.

The design for the Wendy’s, and for the other 19 murals, will not be revealed ahead of time. But Trav’s work “generally documents how technology is changing the world through commerce, so the mural will all reflect that one narrative” while leaning “into a lot of the existing architecture of the building,” he says. The artist says he’s also fairly certain that he’ll be working with “warmer orange/red tones for the bulk of the mural.” Though he’s not 100 percent certain what the final design will look like until he can eyeball the building, he says he’ll be “pulling from my stockpile of illustrations and laying it out so that the building becomes the backbone of the work.”

Painting the Wendy’s was Towles’ idea. He recalls going into a planning meeting with NoMa BID and the NoMa Parks Foundation and announcing that he wanted Wendy’s as a canvas. “I said, ‘I want the Wendy’s’ and they’re like ‘What?!’,” says Towles. “‘I want the Wendy’s’ and I was like, ‘Why not? It would be amazing. It’s the main thoroughfare coming in and leaving.”

Final approval to include the Wendy’s in this year’s festival came from the DC Department of Transportation (DDOT), which now owns the building. Seized last year by the Bowser Administration through eminent domain, Wendy’s did not own the building or the land on which the burger joint sat. The District paid the owner of the building, an affiliate of Bernstein Management Corp., at least $13.1 million for the property.

The Wendy’s mural is expected to remain up until the building is torn down, demolition that’s been delayed until the first quarter of 2023. So those who use the intersection — and according to DDOT, that’s 65,000 vehicles daily — will have up to six months to eyeball the art.

What’s next for Dave Thomas Circle after that? The traffic circle that’s housed the Wendy’s since the mid-1980s and has been called an “urban aneurysm,” “kind of lawless” and “a hellscape” is due for a major overhaul — though not a quick one. It will be another six years and approximately $23 million before the tangle of streets that funnel into the traffic circle are transformed into an improved intersection.

The Wendy’s art installation comes just about a year after the Wendy’s served up its last burgers on September 30, 2021.

The painting festival will kick off on Sept. 7 and all the murals should be completed by Sept. 17. The public is invited to come watch the painters in action. According to NoMaBID, DC Walls has delivered more than 80 works of art since it debuted in 2016.

This post has been updated to correct the name of the Pow! Wow! festival and the name of Alethia Tanner Park.