STREET
ART & MURAL
FESTIVAL
2023

Live Art & Music
Downtown Salina
World-Class Muralists
October 5-7

MURAL MAP

Boom 2023 Murals

Boom 2022 & Previous Murals

Campbell Plaza will be the official Boom! home base.

KEY EVENTS

Line up of key Boom! 2023 Events taking place in downtown Salina.

THE ARTISTS

Pichiavo
Featured Artist

Pichiavo

PichiAvo (Pichi, b. 1977; Avo, b. 1985) is a duo of artists from Valencia, Spain. Recognised for their skill at creating connections between painting and sculpture in urban settings, they adopt a thoroughly innovative approach in their artistic fusions. A balanced combination of classical art and the most contemporary urban art can be identified in their work. From the outset PichiAvo shunned artistic individuality, joining forces to create an absolutely unique body of work using a conceptually urban idiom, both in the street and studio.
Add Fuel
Featured Artist

Add Fuel

ADD FUEL is Portuguese visual artist Diogo Machado (b. 1980). With a degree in Graphic Design from Lisbon's IADE – Creative University, he spent a few years working in design studios in Portugal, followed by an eight-month stint in Munich, Germany. Since 2007, he has been focusing exclusively on his artistic work. Starting out under the full name Add Fuel to the Fire, he first created a dark yet exuberant visual universe populated by a cast of slimy, eccentric and joyful creatures, influenced by a variety of interests ranging from video games to comics, animation, sci-fi, designer toys, and urban visual culture. In 2008, fascinated with the aesthetic possibilities of symmetrical patterning and tessellations, he shortened his moniker to Add Fuel and began redirecting his focus towards working with and reinterpreting the language of traditional tile design, and that of the Portuguese tin-glazed ceramic azulejo in particular. Effortlessly blending these two seemingly-irreconcilable visual idioms, his current practice seeks to combine traditional decorative elements with contemporary visual referents into new forms that reveal an impressive complexity and a masterful attention to detail. If, on the face of it, his work in small and medium sized tile panels, large-scale stencil and freehand painted murals, and print editions might seem simply a pastiche of classic formalism, a closer inspection rewards the viewer with a chaotic world of unequivocally original motifs and characters brimming with deep emotions. Creating balance and harmony from symmetrical repetitions, a build-up of layers and techniques of visual illusion such as trompe-l'œil, his multi-layered patterned compositions produce a poetic rhythm that plays with the viewer's perception and the (multiple) possibilities of interpretation. Exploring a wide range of both manual and digital techniques in the fields of drawing, painting, ceramics, and printing, his practice expresses a sophisticated dialogue between the old and the new, between heritage and modernity. Besides the numerous public art interventions he has been creating in various countries, he has also been showcasing his work in solo and group exhibitions in reputed galleries and museums. Diogo Machado lives and works in Cascais, Portugal.
El Mac
Featured Artist

El Mac

EL MAC (Miles MacGregor) is an internationally renowned artist born and based in Los Angeles. He began painting both smaller indoor works as well as public murals and graffiti in Phoenix in the mid 1990s, and since that time has developed his unique visual aesthetic and rendering style which utilizes repeating contour patterns. His work draws on influences from classical European art, social realism, symbolism and devotional art, as well as the Chicano and Mexican culture he grew up around. He is best known for his meticulous paintings and large-scale murals exploring feminine beauty and honoring ordinary, overlooked, or marginalized people. He has been commissioned to paint all over the world, for museums, universities and other cultural institutions, including the Groeninge Museum (Belgium), San José Museum of Art (California), Northeastern University (Boston), University of California (San Diego), QAGoMA (Brisbane), Fondazione PRADA (Italy), and the Mexican secretariat of Foreign Affairs, as well as murals in Belgium, Cambodia, Cuba, Denmark, England, Germany, Ireland, Morocco, Puerto Rico, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, and Viet Nam. For over twenty years he has aimed "to uplift and inspire through careful, perfectionist renderings of both the sublime and the humble".
Mad C
Featured Artist

Mad C

MadC was born as Claudia Walde in Germany in the 1980s. Throughout 25 years of constant engagement with art, in the streets as well as in galleries, she worked her way up from a teenager starting off with a spray can to one of the worlds top urban contemporary artists. She holds degrees in Graphic Design from two universities and published three books about street art. MadC’s monograph “From Street to Canvas”, written by Luisa Heese, was published by HENI London in 2021. Her canvases are exhibited in solo and group exhibitions worldwide. In 2023 Museum Reinhard Ernst will open its doors in Germany containing five permanent glass installations by MadC. But she also always had this immediate connection with the street itself, which shows in the numerous colorful murals she painted around the world. MadC was invited to paint murals for Sinkka Museum in Finland, The Dulwich picture gallery in London, for the city of Abu Dhabi in the UAE and by the prestigious Mural Arts Program in Philadelphia, just to name a few. MadC’s style has its roots in graffiti art, resulting in vividly colored, dynamic calligraphy and transparency where all layers shine through and thereby capture the energy of painting on a massive scale in the street, without using a direct graffiti language. Her unique use of color, composition and layering are perfectly paired with the spontaneously and fast painted lines of the calligrapher. The abstract paintings boast of energy and depths. They draw you in and capture the viewer in a universe universally understood, surpassing languages and cultures. MadC’s work has been covered by various magazines and newspapers such as National Geographic, FAZ Magazine, Saatchi Magazine, GQ, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, The Source, GraffitiArt Magazine and many more.
Pat Perry
Featured Artist

Pat Perry

Pat Perry (b. Michigan, 1991) is an American artist primarily painting, drawing, photographing, and implementing large-scale outdoor murals around the world. Many of Pat’s projects have supported various social causes including cooperative projects with the Beehive Design Collective, AptArts, the UN Commissioner For Refugees, and No More Deaths. Recent solo exhibitions include shows at Hashimoto Contemporary NYC, Takashi Murakami’s Hidari Zingaro Gallery in Tokyo, and a museum show at UICA in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Pat lives and works in Detroit.
Queen Andrea
Featured Artist

Queen Andrea

Andrea von Bujdoss (AKA "Queen Andrea") is a NYC-based fine artist, muralist, graffiti artist, typographer and graphic designer. A die-hard native New Yorker raised in downtown Manhattan, Andrea has been deeply inspired by the urban landscape from an early age. Her style is consistently marked by a bold use of color, design and advanced typography. As a young teen part of a newer generation of early 1990's graffiti writers, she befriended some of the most prolific old school subway graffiti writers and diligently taught herself the complicated artform of graffiti by consistently practicing her letters and eventually developing her own unique style. She earned a BFA in Graphic Design and began a successful career, working for worldwide brands who appreciate her versatile and passionate knowledge of typography, branding and visual communication. Her work has directly impacted graffiti, streetwear and urban culture. Andrea has spent nearly 20 years perfecting her graffiti and typography skillset and she is now one of the most notable female graffiti artists in the world. The excitement, color, diversity and crazy energy of city life, and especially graffiti, is where Andrea finds her creative inspiration. Renegade cutting-edge artforms, brash sub-cultures and lifestyles that have sprang forth from an ever-changing urban metropolis give her the visual stimulus, the guts, and the urge to create and innovate. Her artistic style is influenced by an endless appreciation of typography, as well as themes of urban life, hip hop lyrics, the advertising age, pop culture, geometry, symbolism, signpainter lettering and super bright color palettes. Andrea's newest paintings are intricate and intense explorations of geometry, color and form which create fantastical, bright worlds of abstraction. Back in the streets, Andrea has developed a reputation for her oversized typography murals. She has been featured in major art shows, solo shows, magazines, books, fashion lines, brand collaborations and has curated and exhibited in numerous art shows around the world.
Chris Stain
Featured Artist

Chris Stain

American Born. 1972. I was raised in the working class neighborhood of Highlandtown in Baltimore, MD. My interest in art began with NYC subway graffiti in the mid 1980s. Having learned printmaking methods in high school, I eventually shifted my technique toward stenciling. In 2000 I began exhibiting my work. Adapting images from photographs and working with spray paint, stencils, and paper to create interior/exterior works, I seek to convey an authentic contemporary document that illustrates the triumph of the human spirit as experienced by those in underrepresented urban and rural environments.
Martha Cooper
Featured Photographer

Martha Cooper

Martha Cooper is a documentary photographer who has specialized in shooting urban vernacular art and architecture for over forty years. In 1977, Martha moved from Rhode Island to New York City and worked as a staff photographer at the NY Post for three years. During that time she began to document graffiti and B-Boying, subjects which led to her extensive coverage of early Hip Hop as it emerged from the Bronx. These photos, published worldwide, helped make Hip Hop the predominant international youth movement it is today.
Boom! Salina is an annual mural festival in the heart of downtown Salina, KS. The larger vision is to bring in street artists and muralists from around the world to enhance the visual landscape of our city. The festival is funded through private and crowd sourced donors that share a creative hunger to be bold and inspiring. Boom! Salina is a backed by the Salina Kanvas Project.

ABOUT BOOM!

It was all a dream...

Boom! Salina is an annual mural festival in the heart of downtown Salina, KS. This invite only event brings in street artists and muralists from around the world to enhance the visual landscape of our city. The festival is funded through private and crowd sourced donors that share a creative hunger to enhance our community through  bold and inspiring public works of art. Backed by the Salina Kanvas Project, a wide range of community organizations.

PARTNERS & DONORS

Drs. Kate & Guy
Gross
Tom & Nancy
Pestinger
Norm & Kristy
Yenkey
Morrie & Sydney Soderberg
Mollie Carter