Stephen “ESPO” Powers + Sneke, Arub, Hews, Myth (website, Instagram)
Location: 2020 1st Avenue (Parking Lot)
Artist Statement 
(click to listen to the description)
This is where the artist statement is written
More information (click to listen to the description)
On the side of a building on First Avenue between Lenora and Virginia, just up from the old Vain salon in Belltown, there’s a mural that has become one of the neighborhood’s most quietly enduring landmarks. It was painted in 2014 by Stephen “ESPO” Powers — New York-based artist, graffiti pioneer, and one of the most significant figures in the transition of street art into contemporary public art — during a visit to Seattle for the Seattle Interactive Conference.
Powers first made his name in the late 1990s under the tag ESPO — standing for “Exterior Surface Painting Outreach” — painting throughout New York City with work that deliberately blurred the line between illegal graffiti and legitimate signage. He went on to become a Fulbright scholar and the creator of landmark mural projects in Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Baltimore, Dublin, and Belfast, including his celebrated A Love Letter for You series of 50 murals along Philadelphia’s elevated train line.
His hallmark is graphic lettering woven into imagery — murals that function like love letters to the cities where they live. The Seattle piece is no different in spirit, but very much of its place and moment: packed with references to technology and geek culture, including a dig at Android and iPhone cable incompatibility and a nod to anyone “still running Windows.” As Powers put it at the time, “it’s an à la carte buffet — you can have it all, or you can have none of it. If you have the appetite for it, there’s a lot here.”
The mural has lived on the wall for over a decade now, accumulating the kind of neighborhood memory that only time can build.
During the 2025 Belltown Mural Festival, Sneak and a crew worked respectfully around its lower edge — not over it — adding new pieces that treated the ESPO as an anchor rather than a backdrop. That’s the best kind of endorsement a wall can get.
Back to the Belltown Murals: map, overview web page