BILLINGS — Sixteen new murals will soon brighten north Billings as a part of the area's first mural festival.
This weekend, from Sept. 5-8, the "Wild West Walls" festival will be taking over the East Billings Urban Revitalization District, which includes north Billings, on over a dozen businesses in the area. People can also enjoy the event themselves. Throughout the weekend, booths at the 406 Events Lawn will display artwork from the various artists for purchase.
Tyson Middle is an artist and founder of Underground Culture Krew and has painted several murals around town, including a project for the festival on the Fisher Flooring Warehouse at 201 N. 15th St.
The event, which is sponsored by the Billings Industrial Revitalization District, is something he has had in the works for over a year.
“Coordinating this with 16 plus artists has been quite the trip. There's everybody's needs, wants, things. There's paint orders, all kinds of things. 2,260 cans I believe are about to get dumped in Billings in the matter of the next five days or so. It's been quite the undertaking," said Middle.
He felt that there has been a need for artwork in the EBURD, which is something they have been working towards to help improve the district.
"There's a lot of just gray walls, brown walls, drab walls. Let's make it warm, welcoming, inviting," said Middle.
Billings has seen several murals pop up around downtown over the years, but nothing quite to this scale.
"Billings is going to see some newer art, some fresh art, some different stuff. It'll be a little bit more than what they're not used to but also still awesome," said Middle.
Eighteen artists from all over the country were welcomed to the event, all selected through an application process. Each coordinated with the business owners of the wall they were painting for a design. As this is a massive undertaking, Middle said funds for the supplies and various other expenses were paid for through the businesses themselves and fund-raising.
“I've had some people come forth with thousands of dollars out of their personal pocket, which is, just, it's hard touching. It's something else to see someone just hand over this fat sack because they believe in you and they trust you and they love what you're doing with the community and the art," said Middle.
The Red Oxx and 406 Event Lawn at 323 N. 14th St. is just one of the businesses receiving a mural, and taking on the challenge is local Billings artist Ernie Fuglevand.
“Having somebody else have confidence in your work enough to be like, yeah, you should put it on a wall, you know, really big, like that's pretty cool," said Fuglevand.
This will be Fuglevand's first mural. He grew up in Billings and Chinook before moving to Seattle, but he moved back to Billings last year and said he is glad to be a part of various community projects like Wild West Walls.
“It's good to see Billings doing stuff like this. I hope there's more of it," said Fuglevand.
His day job is working in construction as an ironworker, something he used as inspiration for the mural as the requested theme was, "industrial evolution".
"I just wanted to honor and give visibility to working people and kind of glorify them, like what if we were all cool robots and all the kind of regular stuff we do all the time seems a little more interesting?" said Fuglevand.
The mural features numerous robots in different settings and uses only a select amount of colors, the most prominent of which was red. Fuglevand said the fun part about his artwork is that it can be interpreted differently by the viewer.
“They're either kind of mindless drones trudging about and just really happy in their work, or they're just a bunch of groovy robots that are having a good time farming,” said Funglevand.
The project allows for more creativity from artists and brings pride to the area.
"It's been an experience, for one for the books. This is history. It's Billings history for sure,” said Middle.
“It's nice to have more reasons to be like, no, stop in Billings. Billings is cool on its own," said Fuglevand.
