Artist: Aaron Asis (website, Instagram)
Location: 3rd & Battery
Mural Description 
(click to listen to the description)
Before the Belltown Mural Festival existed, before the painted walls and the walking tours and the lift-mounted artists, there was By Belltown — a quieter, stranger, more personal kind of public art project that set the tone for everything that followed.
By Belltown is a multi-year community-inspired mural project created to celebrate the past, present, and future of Belltown. Designed and installed by Aaron Asis — Belltown United’s artist-in-residence — it grew from four murals in 2021 to three more in 2022 and three final murals in 2023, ultimately comprising ten distinct works installed across the neighborhood’s historic buildings.
What makes By Belltown unlike any painted wall is its medium and its method. Each mural pairs site-specific historic imagery drawn from Seattle’s municipal archives with statements collected directly from current Belltown community members — layering past and present onto the same surface, on the very buildings those histories belong to.
The project was born from a community phone call in early 2020 about the future of the neighborhood, shaped by the pandemic and a deep desire to get people back out onto the streets after months of isolation. It was, from the beginning, less about decoration than about memory — and about what a neighborhood owes to the people who made it.
Artist Statement (click to listen to the description)
There is great wisdom in these historic images of the past and there is even greater wisdom in these neighborhood voices of the present — but it’s only when we combine the two that we can start to see a more inspired vision for the future.
Back to the Belltown Murals: map, overview web page