Recent Works

This gallery presents an overview of the recent public artworks funded by Rainbow Community Arts with images, locations and a listing of the primary artists and their teams of mural painters.

2025 Photo Gallery

Alley Aquarium – Continued


Each year, we restore this Alley Aquarium by cleaning up the existing fish and creating additions to this undersea world. Rainbow Arts invites families with children to make public art on alley walls all over downtown. These vibrant and fanciful fish make otherwise lonesome alleys into colorful walkways. 
Location:  Alley wall of Ninevah, 113 Capitol Way North.

Sound & Color

In partnership with hummingbird studio, Rainbow helped to fund a new mural titled, sound & Color. This mural is one of the few public artworks created by and representative of people of all physical abilities as well as People of Color. Lead artist Vega Dawson worked closely with over 40 artists to design and paint a vibrant mural that demonstrates hummingbird studio’s motto, “Art Belongs to Everyone.” Location: La Gitana restaurant, 518 Capitol Way South.

Plum Street YMCA Mural

The “Wellness” mural is beginning of a one year joint project with the South Sound YMCA to create an 8-panel mural called, “Touchstones of the YMCA”. This mural will be created through a series of community partnerships intended to design, fund & support this multi-panel mural project. Each panel will represent the diverse communities that make up the South Sound YMCA and will be developed in partnership with local organizations that are centered within the community being represented. Individually, each mural will be a distinct public art work with the entire series linked by three unifying elements. Location: Plum Street YMCA, 505 Plum St SE, Olympia.

Hands Across the Generations

Rainbow partnered with Senior Services of South Sound to host an intergenerational arts project that paired seniors with youth to create a colorful mural featuring colorful handprints on a canvas-based mural. Older painters were joined by a 4th grade class of painters for a workshop that resulted in a new public artwork. This represents the third partnership with Senior Services that has brought artists of all ages. Location:  Olympia Senior Center, 222 Columbia Avenue SE, Olympia.

2024 Photo Gallery

  • Alley Aquarium
    With the Alley Aquarium project, Rainbow Arts creates mural projects that invite artists of all ages who are new to making art on walls to join us. Tucked into alleys all over downtown, there are fish swimming along the walls, painted in wild colors by painters of all skill levels.
  • Migration of the Rainbow Wings
    Olympia’s Rainbow Wings mural is intended to create a place of presence and belonging for the LGBTQ community and allies in the face of opposition to equal rights. As an interactive mural, it also offers a great backdrop for selfie photos. Now in its third location, the mural has been renamed. Migration of the Rainbow Wings. Each time, the mural painting was led by Chelsea Baker with a multi-racial team of painters including Regine Varughis, Darishma Alphonse, Anna Schlecht, Lola Lains e Silva, and others.
  • The Arc of Aging
    2024 | Artists: Chelsea Baker, Regine Varughis, and Anna Schlecht. The design of the “Arc of Aging” mural affirms the presence of our community elders by acknowledging the stages of aging as all part of the same arc.
  • Water People of the Shore
    Lugwut was the final element of a larger mural called, Water People of the Shore painted in the Costal Salish tradition. Lugwut is a figure from Salish tribal tradition that is similar to Big Foot or Sasquatch. The mural features a natural waterfront scene as background with a wide range of aquatic and shoreline animals of the Salish Sea depicted in the Coastal Salish style. This mural was painted by Nisqually artists Kyle Sanchez and his family along with Christopher Gerber.
  • Ravens Chasing the Moon
    Cowlitz tribal artist Sarah Folden worked with Chehalis tribal artist Jenée Redecker to paint an iconic image of ravens flying above a mountain, under a full moon in the contemporary Coast Salish tradition. Sarah and Jenee also brought on a team of youth apprentices, each of whom had some Native ancestry, including Adam Penn, Angelina Smart-Weber, Ayla Williams-Weber, Corbin Jones and Lola Lains e Silva.
  • The “Great Wave Off Kanagawa” Mural Restoration Project
    The original “Great Wave Off Kanagawa” artwork was created by the Japanese woodblock print artist Hokusai in 1831. The 1977 recreation mural was created in Olympia, WA by artist Joe Tougas & friends, and the restoration was done in 2024 by artist Austin Michael Davis.