How Figurative Art Contributes to Placemaking: Murals and Memorials

A Place You Recognize, Not Just a Place You Pass

Walk through almost any neighborhood and some corners just feel different. Not because of the architecture — because something on a wall makes you stop and think, that’s here, that’s us. That feeling has a name: placemaking. It’s what turns a stretch of sidewalk into somewhere you actually belong, rather than somewhere you just pass through.

Abstract art can do a lot of things. But if you want a place to feel recognizable instantly, without an artist statement to decode, figurative art tends to be the faster route. A face, a gesture, a familiar storefront painted larger than life — you don’t have to decode it, you just see yourself in it. That’s how figurative art contributes to placemaking. Moreover, it’s exactly what’s happening in two very different kinds of public art: murals and memorials.

Murals: A Neighborhood, Painted Back to Itself

Community murals have been doing this work for close to a century. They range from WPA-era walls to the Chicano muralism movement to citywide programs like Philadelphia’s Mural Arts. The instinct behind all of them is the same. You deserve to see your own neighborhood reflected back at you, not just decorated around.

Seattle muralist Kelly Bjork gets this instinct better than most. Kelly’s 2024 mural for Seattle Parks & Recreation and the Hillman City Neighborhood Association stretches 85 feet across a cement wall. It depicts the actual storefronts of businesses throughout the neighborhood. If you live in Hillman City, you’ll recognize every one of them. That’s not decoration. Instead, that’s a record, proof of exactly which businesses made up that block, preserved in paint.

Kelly’s piece for the Broadway Business Improvement Area does something even bolder with the same idea. Painted onto a signal box on Capitol Hill’s Broadway East, it features portraits of five of Seattle’s LGBTQ+ City Council members — Cheryl Chow, Sherry Harris, Sally Clark, Tom Rasmussen, and Tina Podlodowski. It’s a small canvas in a spot you’d walk past without a second thought. This is exactly the point. The neighborhood’s queer civic history isn’t behind museum glass. Instead, it’s built into the street furniture you pass on your way to the bus stop.

This is how figurative art contributes to placemaking at neighborhood scale. It doesn’t just sit near a community’s story. Additionally, it becomes part of the path people walk every day.

See It Off the Wall, Too

Bjork’s murals prove you don’t need four walls of your own to build identity and connection. This fall, you can see that same instinct up close, indoors. She’s one of ten artists featured in Form Over Function: Held Together, our third annual exhibition, opening October 17th at our Georgetown gallery. The show explores identity as something “continually formed through our connections with others and the communities we build” — which, if you think about it, is placemaking too. It’s just under a roof instead of out on a wall.

RSVP here for updates on the show and the artists before opening night.

Memorials: Building Memory Into the Places We Live

If murals work at neighborhood scale, memorials work at the scale of one story. They give a community somewhere to hold onto someone it doesn’t want to lose. An abstract marker can commemorate. In contrast, a human likeness lets you feel met by what you’re looking at.

One of the most personal projects we’ve had the honor of working on is a tribute screen for a multi-family housing development in Aurora, Colorado. The project’s visionary was the late Pastor Felix of Restoration Christian Fellowship, who spent his ministry pursuing stable housing for his community. The land now holding that development used to be a tiny home village the church sponsored. The new complex sits just a few hundred yards from where the congregation still meets today. So the site itself carries his story forward.

The art drew directly from his life: his Caribbean home of origin, his lifelong love of jazz. We never had the chance to meet him ourselves. However, we had the honor of working closely with his wife, Pastor K, and her team to bring his spirit into the project. This isn’t a memorial you visit once a year — it’s woven into a building people will live in every day. That means his memory becomes part of the daily texture of home, not a once-a-year stop.

Two Scales, One Idea

Whether it’s a whole neighborhood recognizing its own storefronts and civic history on a wall, or one family and a community of residents carrying forward a beloved pastor’s spirit, the mechanism is the same. Figurative art gives people something to recognize themselves in. Moreover, that recognition is what makes a place feel like it belongs to the people who live there. Murals do it outward, at neighborhood scale. Memorials do it inward, for one story that ripples out to everyone who shares that space. Either way, that’s how figurative art contributes to placemaking — it isn’t really about the object on the wall. It’s about whose story gets to live in a place, permanently, where everyone can see it.

We Can Help With Yours

If any of this has you thinking about your own space — a wall, a lobby, a development — we’re happy to talk through what figurative art could do for it. Join us October 17th for the opening of Form Over Function: Held Together and see the range in person. Alternatively, reach out and we’ll help you think through a mural, memorial, or commission of your own.