Walls That Speak

Mural 01 · Failing St (facing)

Solidarity with Standing Rock

Spencer Keeton Cunningham · 2017

There is no quiet corner on this wall. Every inch is alive — teepees clustered in amber and orange, rainclouds dropping blue teardrops, oil derricks standing alongside traditional camp circles, geometric borders zigzagging in every direction. Animals move through it all.

This is Spencer Keeton Cunningham’s visual language: traditional Indigenous patterns and symbols in direct collision with the imagery of extraction and industry. There is no separation between the sacred and the political — they occupy the same space, as they always have for the communities whose land and water have been at stake.

The mural was inspired by the 2016 protests at Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, where thousands of people — Indigenous communities and allies from across the country — gathered to oppose construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Cunningham traveled there himself, and what he witnessed wasn’t the conflict that dominated media coverage. He saw community. He saw family. He saw people who understood, in their bones, that land and water are not commodities.

Part of a national series Cunningham created in response to Standing Rock, each mural in the series responds to its specific location and moment. This one was commissioned by XRAY.FM through community fundraising — a neighborhood coming together to put something on a wall worth stopping for.

Mural 02 · Michigan Ave

Crater Lake Trickster

Spencer Keeton Cunningham · 2018

Look closely and the layers reveal themselves: stratified bands of terracotta, crimson, and teal running along the bottom like a cross-section of the earth itself. Above them, a landscape of small erupting volcanoes and braided blue rivers. And sitting in the middle of all of it is a figure with the head of a wolf or coyote, its body completely covered in Indigenous geometric patterns: arrows, diamonds, chevrons, circles, all rendered in soft blue on warm skin tones. A halo floats above its head.

This is the Trickster — a figure found across many Indigenous traditions, a shape-shifter and boundary-crosser, at once sacred and irreverent, wise and mischievous. Cunningham roots this archetype in the landscape of the Pacific Northwest: the volcanic terrain, the waterways, the layered geology of a place that has been transforming for millennia.

Painted the year after his Standing Rock mural, this piece shifts register — from protest to mythology, from urgency to something more expansive. The Trickster doesn’t march or resist. It simply sits, enormous and knowing, woven into the land itself, as if it has always been there and always will be.

Mural 03 · Failing St at Michigan Ave

Mni Wiconi

Water Is Life · Jesse Hazelip · 2017

An ancient Lakota prophecy speaks of a black snake that slithers across the land — desecrating sacred sites, poisoning water, and eventually destroying the earth. For the Indigenous communities who gathered near Standing Rock, that snake had a name: the Dakota Access Pipeline.

That snake is exactly what you see here — massive, two-headed, coiling across the full width of the wall. Its scales are rendered with painstaking detail, its bodies looping and overlapping in a tangle of black. Rising through the center of it all is a single silver sword inscribed with the words Mni Wiconi — Water Is Life. Behind the creature, the wall erupts in deep reds and oranges, part fire, part floral, part fury.

Jesse Hazelip was born in Colorado, surrounded by Navajo and Ute Nation territories. That proximity to Indigenous land and culture shaped the way he sees the world — and what he makes in it. He has never been shy about using art as a form of testimony.

This mural is his tribute to the Water Protectors — the people who stood in the pipeline’s path, at great personal risk, to defend something most of us take for granted every time we turn on a tap. The sword facing down the snake is an image of hope: fragile, determined, and alive.

Mural 04 · Failing St (next to Mni Wiconi)

Keep Looking Up

Artist TBD · c. 2019

A crowd fills this wall — men, women, children, elders, gathered together on what looks like a porch or outdoor space, rendered entirely in grayscale as if lifted from an old family photograph. Dozens of faces. Everyone looking out. And written below them in loose, handwritten script: “Keep looking up, everything good is up.”

It is an image of community as archive — a record of presence, of people who gathered and were seen. In a city where the history of Black Portland has often been erased or overlooked, work like this insists on visibility. These faces belong here. They have always belonged here.

We are still working to identify and properly credit the artist behind this piece.

Feature · Failing St Entrance

The Entrance Door

Life Rooted in Love · Richard Cawley

The original door here was painted as part of the Mni Wiconi mural — a seamless extension of the artwork into the building itself. That door no longer exists.

During a roof replacement, a roofer fell through. When the rescue team arrived, they had to kick in the door to reach him — and in doing so, destroyed it. Thankfully, the roofer survived.

What stands in its place is the work of local metal fabricator and sculptor Richard Cawley. His door carries its own quiet message: that love is the root from which everything grows, the ground that makes everything else possible. In its own way, it continues the spirit of the work around it.

Mural 05 · Michigan Ave (Front of Building)

To Whom It May Concern

Chris P. Martin · 2019

The mural on the front of this building grew out of a solo exhibition — a body of work dedicated, in the artist’s words, to “the unfair world.”

Chris P. Martin created a series of works written in the voice of angels — not heavenly beings offering comfort, but witnesses to history, composing letters about slavery and segregation in the American South. The format is satirical. The subject is not.

Working in stark black and white, Martin strips everything down to its essential elements — words and images reduced to their cores, so that what remains carries full weight. There’s a lyricism to the work, a rhythm that moves between grief and defiance. It asks you to look without looking away.

Mural 06 · Michigan Ave · on the same wall as “To Whom It May Concern”

Portrait: Sister

Reginald O’Neal · c. 2019

This intimate portrait occupies the center of the wall that Chris P. Martin painted — a grayscale image of a woman holding a young child, their faces close, rendered with the quiet tenderness of a family photograph. The child looks directly out at the viewer. The woman’s gaze is turned slightly, as if caught in a private moment. Tucked into the lower corner is a small color photograph of a woman standing alone — the artist’s sister, present in the work as both subject and dedication.

The painting is signed L.E.O. — the tag of Reginald O’Neal, a Miami-based artist whose gripping figurative work is rooted in his own community and family. O’Neal bases his paintings on personal photographs, transforming autobiographical images into large-scale works that are at once intimate and monumental. His work has been described as depicting “fragments of lives with emotion and intimacy” — and this quiet portrait, painted on a Portland wall far from his Miami home, is exactly that.

Mural 07 · Alley Behind Michigan Ave

The Alley Mural

João Ruas · Presented by Forest for the Trees

At the center of this mural stands a solitary figure — a woman draped head to toe in deep red, her face turned slightly, composed and still. She is surrounded by chaos: a massive dark creature, part beast, part myth, rears up behind her, its limbs tangled with thorned roses and hollow antlers. And yet she does not flee. She holds her ground.

The palette says everything: warm red against cold teal, the human against the monstrous, the tender against the untamed. It’s a confrontation — but also, somehow, a kind of coexistence. Neither figure overwhelms the other. They seem bound together in a story that began long before this wall and won’t end here.

This is the visual world of João Ruas: mythological, melancholic, and alive with tension. Born in São Paulo and shaped by years of studio work between Brazil and the United Kingdom, Ruas draws from folklore, magical realism, and the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi — the beauty found in imperfection and impermanence. His figures feel like they have wandered in from old stories we’ve half-forgotten.

The mural was brought to Portland through Forest for the Trees, the city’s annual public art festival, which since 2014 has placed international artists on walls across the city. Finding a Ruas tucked in an alley is exactly the kind of discovery FFTT makes possible.