Artist: Nalisha Estrellas (website, Instagram)
Location: 1st & Blanchard
Mural Description 
(click to listen to the description)
On the parking lot wall of the Black Cat Bar on First Avenue, Nalisha Estrellas painted one of the most quietly captivating works in the Belltown Mural Festival — a piece whose title, Symbiotic, carries the full weight of everything this artist believes about the relationship between living things.
Nalisha is a nature-inspired artist whose work spotlights a reverence for plants, the moon, and sacred geometry, with illustrations that capture a sense of movement and flow. Having lived in the Pacific Northwest for twenty years, she has developed a deep appreciation for the tiny and often overlooked treasures of the region’s forests, beaches, and high deserts — all rendered in precise line work and detailed compositions.
Dance has shaped her eye as much as any artistic influence. Having trained in ballet, tap, jazz, modern, and contemporary ballet since the age of six, she sees movement everywhere — in the way a plant reaches like a dancer extending a limb, in the way line can lead a viewer’s gaze across a wall the way a performer leads a gaze across a stage. Her art and her dancing, she has said, have always had a symbiotic relationship — each one feeding and evolving the other.
That sensibility is exactly what lands on the wall at 2132 First Avenue: nature not as backdrop but as living system, each element in conversation with everything around it. It has already become one of the neighborhood’s favorite stops — a stunning piece that draws visitors specifically to seek it out.
The mural was created as part of Belltown United’s work through the City of Seattle’s Hope Corps grant — public funding channeled directly into a piece of art that asks its viewers to pause and notice the intricate, interdependent world that surrounds them, even on a Belltown sidewalk.
Artist Statement (click to listen to the description)
Nalisha Estrellas bio from Belltown Mural Festival:
Nalisha Estrellas is a first-generation Latine’ artist. Nalisha draws botanical beauty and abstract landscapes as a meditative practice. With a focus on pacific northwest plants and animals, their compositions attempt to capture a sense of movement and flow. They give a gentle nod to sacred geometry while recreating the familiar using a whimsical psychedelic lens. As a mural artist, Nalisha has installed original public works across the Pacific Northwest. Previous clients include Bellevue Art Museum, Amazon, Bellwether Housing and The City of Tukwila. You can find them tattooing their unique designs at Capitol Hill’s Elevation Project.
Back to the Belltown Murals: map, overview web page