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When you zoom out, what do you see?

Monday September 15, 2025

This summer, Calgary’s streets and walls became something more than surfaces, they became a place. BUMP Festival 2025 asked: What if BUMP wasn’t just a festival, but a place we created together? A place built through murals, movement, sound, and gathering. A disruption of neutral space. A living archive where memory, culture, and imagination leave their mark on the built environment.

Across the Beltline and beyond, our 2025 mural artists transformed the city into a site of civic reimagination. Together, their works ask who gets remembered in our cities, how stories live on walls, and how beauty, disruption, and community transform public space into something more than efficiency and commerce.

Here’s what now lives on Calgary’s walls:

  • Matthew Springer – a jubilant band of creatures and characters marches across Commonwealth Bar & Stage, embodying the ethos of music and friendship in Calgary’s scene.

  • Absen – Road to Home flips the familiar mountain narrative: a girl leans joyfully from a car window, heading into Calgary, reframing our city as destination.

  • Steph Babij – Held By The Land spans rivers, forests, prairies, and mountains, guided by Indigenous storytelling and ancestral relationships between land and sky.

  • Nicole Boyce – Passage wraps WINS Thrift Store in layered abstract forms that shift with light and perception, asking us to reconsider clarity and knowing.

  • Nathan Meguinis  – Grandmother & Grandfather of the West Direction at Bow Valley College draws on Dèné Tsuut’ina teachings, honouring love, strength, and the next generation of leaders.

  • Megan Oldhues – Linens in the Wind captures daily beauty in fabric and gesture, a fleeting moment painted with intimacy and grace.

  • Drew Young – Barbed Oasis entwines barbs and irises, a striking reminder that pain and beauty are rooted together.

  • Ratur – a fossilized traffic light overtaken by nature, balancing ruin and rebirth, meditating on life beyond human control.

When you zoom out, what you see is not just murals on walls, but a city in the act of becoming. A city imagined by many people, disrupted and transformed through art.