Walk down Main Street in Lowell this month and the brick looks different. Not renovated, not repainted in the ordinary sense. The wall behind the Chamber of Commerce building, the one nobody really looked at twice for years, now holds a wildlife scene pulled straight from the Flat River. A few blocks over, the old Lowell Light & Power site has become a portal of light and color where there used to be blank siding. If you've lived here long enough to remember when these walls were just walls, the change is the kind of thing you mention to a neighbor without quite being able to explain why it matters.
Here's why it does. This is the first time downtown Lowell has had a coordinated public art program at all, and the way it got funded says something about how this town moves when it decides to do something together.
The Wall That Used to Be Just a Wall
The program is called Muralocity, and it came out of a partnership between Lowell Arts and the city's Downtown Development Authority. The budget was $100,000, split three ways: $50,000 from the DDA and the Lowell Area Community Fund, and the rest raised through a public crowdfunding campaign on Patronicity that had to clear $25,000 by July 31 to unlock a dollar-for-dollar match from the Michigan Economic Development Corporation.
Thirty-eight donors raised $26,810, clearing the goal with days to spare. That single fact is the mechanism worth sitting with: the murals on your street exist because the state agreed to match whatever the town put up first, and the town put up enough. Lowell Arts executive director Janet Teunis put it simply when the campaign closed, saying the murals would "belong to everyone in Lowell, every day, for years to come."
The call for artists drew 197 applicants from across the country, a number that tells you Lowell wasn't just filling wall space with whoever was available. Five sites were identified through a public survey of residents before a single design was chosen, and each site came with a theme the community had already voted for in spirit, whether that was river history, native wildlife, or the electrical infrastructure the town used to run on.
Four Walls, Four Stories
Four of the five murals are finished or nearly there. Here's what each one is and where to find it.
| Location | Artist | What It Shows |
|---|---|---|
| Main Street, historic district | Christopher Catalogna (Fort Wayne, IN) | Three-panel piece on Lowell's industrial heritage, set at the point where the Grand and Flat rivers meet |
| Former Lowell Light & Power site | Sıtkı Doğan (Palm Beach, FL) | A science-fiction-influenced take on light and energy, referencing the town's old electrical infrastructure |
| Creekside Park concessions building | Tess Marhofer (Fife Lake, MI) | A four-sided wraparound mural of native plants and animals found around Lee Creek |
| Back of the Chamber of Commerce building | Wendy Popko (Sterling Heights, MI) | A wildlife scene drawn from the Flat River |
Catalogna, who has painted around 20 public art projects over eight years, said he wanted his piece to do more than look good on a wall. "I hope it can help give context to the historic downtown," he told a local reporter, noting that a mural in a historic district carries a responsibility to the place it lives in, not just the wall it's painted on.
Marhofer's building is worth a slower look if you're walking with kids. It wraps all four sides of the Creekside Park concessions and restroom facility, which means the mural changes depending on which side of the park you're standing on. She's a board-certified medical illustrator by training, and this is her first Lowell project after murals in Brighton, Grand Rapids, Ann Arbor, Novi, and Wayland.
The One Building Still Waiting
The fifth site, at the Lowell Arts building itself, is being held back on purpose. That mural is planned for 2027, timed to the nonprofit's 50th anniversary. Lowell Arts has been running gallery shows, theater, concerts, and educational programming here since 1977, reaching more than 66,000 people a year across all of it, and the decision to save its own building for last reads less like a delay and more like the town saving the best seat for the anniversary itself.
If you're used to public art projects finishing all at once, this one didn't. It's staggered on purpose, which means downtown Lowell will keep changing in small, dated increments for at least another year.
The Weekend That Was Already Circled
None of this happened to line up with the Fallasburg Arts Festival, but the timing is worth knowing if you live here. The festival runs its 58th year on September 19 and 20, this coming Saturday and Sunday, at Fallasburg Park just north of town. It's a fixture, not a new addition, and it draws numbers that change how downtown and the park access roads feel for two days:
- Roughly 100 juried fine art and fine craft booths, covering everything from ceramics and glass to metalwork and photography
- Live music on an outdoor stage both days
- Craft demonstrations inside the park pavilion
- A children's area sponsored by Meijer, where kids can decorate a free pumpkin
- A raffle with a queen-size quilt and more than 75 other artist-made items
- Free admission, with parking at $5 per car
- An estimated 25,000 people attending across the weekend, based on past-year figures
If you've been to Fallasburg before, you know what that attendance number does to the roads around the park on a Saturday afternoon. If you haven't, this is the year to time your visit for Sunday morning before the lot fills, then walk the murals downtown afterward while the town is still busy but not overwhelmed.
What Four Murals and a 58-Year-Old Festival Have in Common
Neither of these things needed the other to happen. Fallasburg has run every September for nearly six decades regardless of what downtown looked like. Muralocity would have gotten funded or it wouldn't have, independent of any festival calendar. But this particular September, both are true at once: a town with a genuinely old tradition is also, for the first time, putting new color on its own walls, chosen by its own residents, paid for partly by its own donations.
That's not a coincidence worth over-reading. It's just two things happening to a small town in the same month, one of them 58 years old and one of them finished this summer. Worth a walk either way.
If you're the kind of person who notices when a town starts investing in itself, that instinct tends to extend past murals and festivals. Kristina L Tanner spends a lot of time in Lowell and the surrounding river towns for exactly that reason, and if you're curious what else is changing in this corner of West Michigan, from downtown to the neighborhoods around it, she'd love to show you around. Reach out anytime to start the conversation.
