As Told By | Populus Seattle

Wander down RailSpur Alley outside of Populus on an afternoon this summer and you’ll find it buzzing with activity. A DJ has set up at the center, vinyl cued, the warm crackle of a needle finding its groove pulsing back through the painters working on either side, who are on ladders, painting framed canvases mounted to brick of 130-year-old buildings that have been here since the rebuild after the fire of 1889. The kitchens are at work on the day’s menu, live fire smoke from the hearths drifting out and meeting the salty ocean air off Elliott Bay. They have come together, artists and chefs and musicians, inspired by the World Cup. The trains that once rolled through this alley are gone. The hum has not ceased. What fills the alley now is a reflection of the creative community that has been defining this neighborhood for over forty-five years.

This moment of celebration around sport and community is the curatorial vision of Forest For The Trees. The Pacific Northwest non-profit public art organization has spent the last four years in Pioneer Square cultivating an ecosystem where artists have room to grow, carving out places for creative people and art across the historic facades and alleyways of the neighborhood. As the world grows and changes, they believe, this is what makes a city thrive.

Forest For The Trees

This summer, in collaboration with SeattleFWC26, Seattle’s Local Organizing Committee for the FIFA World Cup, Forest For The Trees has curated The Pioneer Squares, a neighborhood-scale outdoor exhibition of fifteen new commissions installed across Pioneer Square. Together with the food, drink, and music programs at Salt Harvest and Firn, the exhibition forms Beyond the Pitch, the local lens on the world’s tournament, hosted by Populus at RailSpur for the season. The artists live and work on site through a residency at RailSpur Studios and Populus Seattle, developing their commissions in the same environment where the work will be experienced. The artists were chosen to reflect the global and local dynamics of the World Cup, with works honoring the nations playing in Seattle alongside parallel commissions engaging Pride, the Puyallup Tribe, and the broader legacy of the Coast Salish peoples.

Distance: 350 ft

Distance: 200 ft

Distance: 150 ft

Distance: 120 ft

Distance: 0.1 mile

Distance: 170 ft

Distance: 400 ft

Distance: 250 ft

Distance: 0.1 mile

Distance: 250 ft

Distance: 0.1 mile

Artworks

Inferno FC

Caratoes

United in the Game

Mauricio Ramirez

Umm Al-Dunya أم الدنيا

Sa'rah Sabino

Lookin' at You Socceroo

Kwonny

In Motion

Al-Baseer Holly

Fools Goal

Dana Blume

Night Moves

Devin Liston

Flowers to the Game

Nicol G

Alvaro Mora Arellano

Paul Nunn

Yellana James

Meet the Artists

Forest For The Trees brings together artists from the Pacific Northwest and around the world, each with their own practice and their own relationship to the game.

Caratoes

Belgium

Caratoes is a Belgian-Hong Kong multidisciplinary artist whose practice centers on monumental portraits of women of color. Her work moves across mural, installation, painting, and performance, growing out of graffiti in Hong Kong after early creative work in Amsterdam and at Wieden+Kennedy. She has lived nomadically for over a decade, with international commissions ranging from Facebook's Hong Kong office to public spaces around the world. Red Devils, her commission for Belgium, is a tribute to the country's national football team. The composition holds the team's bold red, yellow, and black, with circular elements echoing the form of a soccer ball, suggesting movement, momentum, and the way sport transcends borders. A cedar branch placed in the background honors the Indigenous peoples of Seattle, the land hosting Belgium's match, weaving local recognition into a global celebration of the game.

Instagram: @caratoes

Mauricio Ramirez

United States

Mauricio Ramirez is a muralist whose vivid, large-scale work has become a defining feature of urban landscapes across the United States. His practice is rooted in a vibrant fusion of street art, pop culture, and Latinx heritage, with kaleidoscopic color palettes and geometric stylization that mark his work as immediately recognizable. His mural for the United States is the most personal of his career. Soccer has shaped his life from youth to college, and he now shares the game with his son. Three generations of family connection to the sport are painted into the work that represents the country. The piece celebrates unity, pride, and the global spirit of the game while honoring the Pacific Northwest through local symbols. For Ramirez, soccer is a bridge between cultures, families, and communities.

Instagram: @mauriciopaints

Sa'rah Sabino

Egypt

Sa'rah "Rah" Melinda Sabino is a Moroccan-American multimedia artist and footwear designer from Boston, based in Portland. Her work moves across painting, sculpture, and installation, exploring identity, duality, culture, and belonging. Her commission for Egypt centers a woman wearing her national team's jersey as a hijab, transforming a symbol of sport into one of identity, protection, and pride. The phrase Mother of the world runs across the wall in English and Arabic, a longstanding cultural reference for Egypt that honors women as carriers of history and belonging. Sabino's jersey-hijab works as a bridge between cultures, reframing sport as a space of layered identity and quiet resilience.

Instagram: @sneakhersole

Kwonny

Australia

Kwonny is a Seattle-based artist born in New York whose practice began while she was living in Australia, where she was first drawn to the local flora and fauna. Her canvases feature animals and mythic figures depicted mid-fight or mid-flight, often involving stretched material and surface tension. Her use of negative space functions as both compositional and conceptual device, holding the friction between history and mythology, predator and prey, domestication and wildness. Her commission for Australia draws on her experience as a Korean-American negotiating the effects of dual cultures and migration. Her work is shaped by years moving between the Pacific Northwest and Australia, and the piece holds the question of who counts as Australian and who carries Australia with them. It is made by an artist who has lived inside the answer.

Instagram: @kwonny.art

Al-Baseer Holly

Al-Baseer Holly is a Philadelphia-born multidisciplinary artist now living on the West Coast. His path to visual art began through music. Early in his career he collaborated as a recording artist with Pharrell Williams and others, and his self-taught visual practice has since become a body of work that rewards careful study. His murals and paintings are bold, deliberate, and grounded in archival research. For The Pioneer Squares, Holly has painted a collage tracing Black contribution to European football across past, present, and future. The piece reads as a single composition spanning generations of players, making visible a global representation that the sport is still learning to recognize. Holly has spoken about the importance of representation on the global stage, and the piece is his contribution to that ongoing visibility.

Instagram: @theartofalbaseer
Website: albaseerholly.com

Dana Blume

Dana Blume is a Seattle-based painter, born in 1993, with a BFA in drawing and painting from California State University Long Beach and an MFA from the University of Washington. His work has been exhibited across the United States, England, Italy, and Singapore. His commission in RailSpur Alley captures the speed, dynamism, and symbolism of soccer rather than offering a literal depiction. Through bold color, playful characterization, and expressive mark-making, the painting reads as an uninhibited celebration of the game. Bodies, ball, and pitch collapse into the kinetic feeling of motion itself.

Instagram: @danablume760

Devin Liston

Devin Liston is a painter and muralist who began his career as part of the collaborative teams CYRCLE and DEVNGOSHA before going solo at the end of 2014. His practice draws from utilitarian objects, sports, bugs, and imagery from his childhood, with an intuitive process that finds meaning in time, space, and the universal nature of competition.

His commission in RailSpur Alley is a study of soccer balls in flight, capturing the different movements of a ball as it is kicked or headed, suspended at different points of its arc. The piece catalogs the sport's small physics, the styles of attack flying through the air, and the language of motion that connects every player to every other.

Instagram: @devin.liston

Nicol G

Nicol G is a Seattle-born realism specialist whose work focuses on murals and pet portraiture, with an emphasis on detail, scale, and a strong sense of presence. Her practice centers on familiar subjects rendered with precision, exploring how everyday imagery takes on new meaning when brought into public space. Her commission in RailSpur Alley pairs a soccer ball with Pacific rhododendrons, Washington's state flower. She describes the piece as flowers offered to the love of the game, a bringing-together of something bold and recognizable from the sport with something local and organic. Realism is central to her practice because she wants her subjects to feel present, familiar, and as if they belong in the space.

Instagram: @niccatnite

It’s the foundation of everything we do.

At Populus Seattle, community is not a backdrop

In that spirit, we’re launching a new storytelling series: As Told By.

As Told By celebrates the makers, artists, entrepreneurs, and tastemakers who shape Seattle’s cultural rhythm. Through their voices, we explore how they experience the city, what inspires their work, and the philosophies that guide their craft. It’s a way to discover Seattle not through a guidebook, but through lived perspective.

As Told By – FFTT

Beyond the Pitch

Forest For The Trees

Meet the Artists

At Populus Seattle, community is not a backdrop