Photo: Eric Mickelson
The Noisy Waters Mural Stage
If you hear something happening next to the main stage at Northwest Tune-Up, it might not be music at all—it might be spray paint splashing against a canvas wall.
This year, Tune-Up is welcoming back the Noisy Waters Mural Stage, a live mural painting space running Friday and Saturday nights from 5–11pm. Set right beside the main stage, it turns the festival’s visual backdrop into something that’s actively being created in real time.
Presented by Paper Whale, the stage brings the spirit of Bellingham's Noisy Waters Mural Festival directly into the heart of the event—where art, music, and public space all start to blur together in the best possible way.
Photo: @fotomataio, courtesy of Paper Whale
What is Noisy Waters?
At its core, Noisy Waters Mural Festival is exactly what it sounds like: artists taking over blank walls and turning them into large-scale public artwork that anyone can walk up to, watch, and engage with.
Each August in Bellingham, WA, world-renowned muralists gather for a weekend of painting, music, demos, education, and community celebration. Artists are given 8’ x 8’ portable walls and just three days to bring their work to life in public view. Visitors vote on their favorites, and winning artists earn opportunities to paint larger permanent murals across the city.
It’s part competition, part festival, part open-air studio—and entirely rooted in the idea that public space gets better when artists are invited into it. This year's festival runs August 14-16, 2026 at the Portal Container Village at the Bellingham Waterfront.
The name itself is a nod to place: “Whatcom,” the name of the surrounding county, comes from the Lhaq’temish word Xwot’qom, meaning “noisy water.”
Photo: Eric Mickelson
Live Paining, Next to the Main Stage
At Tune-Up, that same energy shows up in real time.
The Noisy Waters Mural Stage sits just off the main music footprint, where an artists will be painting live each evening from 5–11pm on Friday and Saturday. While bands play, muralists will be building large-scale work layer by layer—turning a blank surface into something alive over the course of the night.
It’s not background art. It's an event in itself.
You can wander over between sets, watch a piece evolve over hours, or just catch moments of it as you move through the music. Either way, it’s hard not to notice when a wall starts becoming something else entirely.
The stage is presented by Paper Whale, a Bellingham-based placemaking agency that works with creatives, businesses, and civic leaders to build welcoming, people-centered spaces. In their words (and practice), they’re about “accelerating change with intention”—which, in this case, looks a lot like paint, canvas, and public space being actively reimagined in front of a crowd.
Photo: @fotomataio, courtesy of Paper Whale
Featured Muralist: Erika “Teal” Rosendale
This year's featured artist is Erika “Teal” Rosendale, an international muralist originally from California’s Central Coast and now based in Portland, OR. Miss Teal is pictured above with her 1st Place Noisy Waters prize wall mural titled 'Circle of Life', which she painted in the summer of 2024, depicting native salmon in multiple stages of their life cycle. Her iconic Bellingham mural is visible from the Tune-Up grounds on the back of the Natural Systems Design building—just look northeast toward downtown.
Her work pulls from a background shaped by redwoods, coastal landscapes, and early inspiration from comic books and superhero mythology. That mix shows up in her murals—bold, colorful compositions that often feel like they’re trying to wake something up in the space around them.
Rosendale describes her practice as something driven by a desire to spark creativity in the world around her, an approach that fits right into the spirit of Noisy Waters: public art that doesn’t wait to be discovered—it meets you where you are.
Photo: Colin Wiseman
More Than a Wall
What makes the Noisy Waters Mural Stage feel at home at Tune-Up isn’t just the art—it’s the overlap.
Bike racing on one side, live music on another, and in between, a wall slowly becoming a mural as the night unfolds. It’s a reminder that creativity doesn’t always sit in separate categories. Sometimes it just happens in the same space, at the same time, with different tools.
And if you happen to stop by while it’s still in progress, you’ll see the part most murals don’t show: the middle.