If you walk anywhere in Downtown Everett, you are bound to see one of the many graffiti pieces or murals on display. The art is now entwined with the city. But it wasn’t always like this.

Just 10 years ago, graffiti was seen as little more than writing on a wall. Graffiti in the downtown area would get buffed out within a week, usually never color matching the rest of the wall, leaving blotches where art could have been displayed.

To be fair, a lot of the work you would find downtown was mostly random tagging. It was an endless cycle of people tagging up local businesses and owners left scrambling to cover it up.

“Graffiti murals are way different than that,” Jason Grim said. He is the owner of Jag ArtWorks, a graffiti/fine arts supply shop in Downtown Everett.

Back then, it was hard to find the kind of graffiti Everett has now. It took a good amount of exploring for the average Joe to find the big detailed pieces, all hidden in the nooks and crannies of the city.

“You’d have to look under some bridges,” Grim said. “Along the sea wall pieces would pop up occasionally but that stuff they (the city) would buff out pretty quickly.”

Now, these murals can be found on almost every other wall downtown. From local mom and pop shops to parking garages to four stories up on an apartment building, the walls are covered. This is all thanks to the work volunteered by Hype Murals, Jag Art Supply, the Graffaholeks and over 150 artists from all over North and South America.

According to Grim, there are over 90 pieces across North Everett.

It all started with Jag ArtWorks. Grim first opened the store while renting a space at Rockafella Artist Studios, but would eventually move into the shop space on the floor right below it. He would throw art shows for people to just come and hang out.

These events would bring artists together and start to build a community. It was at these art shows that Grim would meet a lot of the local members of the graffiti crew known as the Graffaholeks. The northwest chapter of the crew was still just starting at the time. “We grew together,” Grim said.

Graffaholeks is a nationwide graffiti crew that does events in different cities every year. In 2020 and 2022, their northwest chapter chose to partner with local artists in Everett to “uplift the community by turning boring buildings into art,” one of the event coordinators, Brianna Mattes said. Her husband, Hyper, is a local artist and member of the Graffaholeks northwest chapter.

At “The Black Light Show,” the first big event, Grim said he put black tarps all over the shop, hung blacklights up and brought in a DJ. This event garnered the attention of the Graffaholeks who proposed the idea of a mural event to Grim. They asked Grim to help organize it. The Graffaholeks would provide the artists and it was Grim’s job to see if the city would approve it and help fund it.

The city didn’t fund it but they gave Grim and the Graffaholeks the OK. “As long as it’s nothing profane,” Grim said.

“At first I thought that this would never happen in Everett.”

Most cities have laws that prohibit or at least make it harder to make these kinds of events happen, but Everett does not. All that was left to do was get permission from business and building owners to do these pieces. This was another part of Grim’s job — talking with business owners to let them use their walls.

By August of 2020, Everett got its first graffiti “Grill and Chill” event. More than 40 artists did work all over downtown, ranging from local Washingtonians to people from all over the country. They came together for three days to not only give the city a new look, but to show that graffiti isn’t simply vandalism.

“These artists came out on their own dollar. Bought their own spray paint. They did it for the love of the art,” Grim said. For the first event, he stated it “sold over $4,000 of spray paint.” .

“This was actually one of the first times I realized Everett is actually this cool place where you can make stuff happen,” Grim said while looking back on the “Grill and Chill” event.

In 2022, Everett got its second graffiti event, “Going All City,” this time co-hosted by Hype Murals and once again, the Graffaholeks. But it got bigger. Over 150 artists from all over North and South America came to Everett to add their touch to the already growing artwork across town.

“Going All City” is described by Grim as “when a writer is up all over the place.”

These mural events “show that our city is constantly evolving,” Ben Corey, owner of Pop’s Skate Shop in Downtown Everett, said. “For something that years ago would have been covered up or primed over, now the city actually embraces it.”

The city announced last May that there is a process underway to turn Downtown Everett into a certified Creative District. If the process finalizes, it can create jobs and open a whole new world for artists in Everett.

“Certified districts receive access to state-level marketing support, competitive grant opportunities, technical assistance and specialized signage to help raise visibility,” Everett’s Mayor Cassie Franklin said in a press release from May of last year.

While the murals around town definitely help the city look the part,“The city hasn’t really acknowledged our work in any significant way or given us much credit for our work but the public, the community, have been very supportive,” Mattes said. “We did all the heavy lifting for them (the city).”

Because of that, there are currently no plans for another mural event in Everett. “I can’t see us doing it all again,” Mattes said. “But we’ll take care of the walls we’ve already done.”

Now if the process finalizes, it will not only create jobs. It will also give artists recognition that could lead to more murals going up around the cities.

If you want to see the murals yourself, there is a map of them all online presented by Hype Murals.