Boise, ID
Boise's Freak Alley is one of the West's most beloved outdoor gallery corridors — a city block of consecutive murals repainted annually by a rotating cast of local and visiting artists, creating a living document of the city's creative community. North End's craftsman-era bungalows, Downtown's growing warehouse district, the emerging Linen District, and Hyde Park's neighborhood commercial strip round out a mural scene that has outgrown its college-town origins.
Featured Artists
All artists →Shepard Fairey
"Freak Street Blues" in Freak Alley is Fairey's response to Boise's particular western-progressive character — a city that sits between the libertarian rural Idaho that surrounds it and the liberal college-town values of its core. The composition places a female figure in Fairey's constructivist style against a landscape that is simultaneously mountain wilderness and urban grid, the two zones in uneasy but productive coexistence.
Pat Milbery
Denver's Pat Milbery brought his Rocky Mountain landscape vocabulary to Downtown Boise with "Boise River" — a panoramic abstraction of the river corridor that runs through the city's greenbelt. Painted in Milbery's characteristic mountain-palette of high-altitude blues, granite grays, and the gold of ponderosa pine in October, the mural makes the case that Boise's most important civic asset is the river that flows invisibly beneath its downtown streets.
Aryz
Barcelona's Aryz chose the birds of the Snake River Plain for his North End commission — the peregrine falcon, the golden eagle, and the great horned owl that inhabit the rimrock canyons outside Boise. "Snake River Birds" renders each species in Aryz's characteristic approach of hyperrealistic detail at the scale of the figure's mass, the birds' eyes level with the eyes of passersby at street level.