What's growing

Garden in Sound is art in public, made together, in West Seattle.

Posters on poles. Paint on signs nobody needed anymore. A wall repainted again and again. An old church with its doors open. The objects matter less than what happens around them: a neighbor stops to add a brushstroke, a stranger asks who made this, and the street starts to feel like it's yours.

This site is the front door. The map lets you walk the neighborhood and find the work. The Gardeners Club, on Discord, is where we plan what comes next. The letters tell you when something's on.

Mike

Mike is an artist who lives and works in West Seattle. Trained as an architect, he has spent ten years making what he calls propaganda, with a sly smile: work meant to pull people in, and to shake up who gets a say in a place.

It began in 2016 with posters, each spot with its own mood. Then came derelict land-use signs, eight or nine of them, taken over as canvases. From 2022 to 2025 a gas-station wall on California Avenue went through more than a hundred versions, and over two hundred people added to it, most of them just walking by. Now he looks after the old Admiral Church and fills it with art, music and neighbors.

“Thanks for doing that. It makes me feel like I live in a neighborhood.”

Why

Ask Mike why, and he says: so you can come back later and see proof that you exist. Making something where you live gives you skin in the game. That's what we want to pass on.