North Of Seattle Is A Lovely Small City With One Of America's Greatest Street Art Archives

Street art has had an amazing time this century. Once a criminalized subculture demonized by art's elite, it's now a popular metagenre that's spilled into the halls of prestigious museums and white-box galleries, with artists like Banksy and Shepard Fairey helping to popularize the form. But it still faces one obvious challenge: longevity. Being on exterior walls, the art can be exposed to rain, snow, or baking heat, as well as vandalism and even gentrification. So it's important to offer street art protection, which is exactly what John Carswell has done in Everett, Washington.

Everett, a small coastal city just outside Seattle that's known for its mountain views and irreverent charm, holds the world's largest archive of street art on canvas, called The DogTown Collection. Carswell, the creative force behind the operation, grew up around street artists in Southern California in the 1980s, when the art form was still finding its feet. He realized that street art was empowering, virtuosic, and a vehicle for change. But it was also ephemeral, with authorities quickly painting over the graffiti. Starting in the '90s, he began a project to recreate the works of street art legends on canvas, preserving them for posterity. Today, art enthusiasts visiting Everett benefit from his decades of dedication.

Located in a gallery in the APEX Everett building as part of the American Graffiti & Urban Art Conservation Project (AMGRAF), The DogTown Collection exhibits works from five decades. It features graffiti pioneers, including Cornbread and Under the Influence, and artists taking the form in new directions, like Black Light King. Carswell is also focused on celebrating artists on the fringes of public consciousness. As he told Made in Shoreditch Magazine, "I needed the guys [who] built the art form that history was about to forget."

John Carswell takes a staunch and controversial stance on graffiti, believing that the art form is America's only major contribution to the modern art world. As a result, AMGRAF is ultimately about preserving graffiti and telling the stories of the artists who worked — and in some cases still work — in dangerous, crime-ridden neighborhoods, risking their lives in the pursuit of self-expression. So visitors to the gallery are getting the closest thing to a full chronological history of American urban art.

The canvases, commissioned from the original artists, were created in the same fashion as the originals: with only aerosol spray paint. Thousands of pieces are in the collection (with more being brought in still), but how many are on display at any one time depends on the exhibition. The "Prophets, Teachers & Kings" (PTK) project might be AMGRAF's greatest sub-collection of artworks; Carswell described it as the "standing pinnacle" of the genre in Made in Shoreditch Magazine. Featuring more than 100 original pieces — including a 105-foot mural created by the venerable Under the Influence crew out of Los Angeles and telling the story of an urban street artist — PTK works are always on display at the gallery.

Unsurprisingly, the city of Everett has capitalized on its unlikely status as urban art custodian and began commissioning graffiti artists, including local artist Hyper, to paint the walls of town in their signature styles. In 2021, Everett and Hyper organized a graffiti jam, which resulted in around 40 new murals worth around $1.5 million sprayed across the city in just a handful of days. If you're visiting Everett, you can find a street art map on the Visit Everett website that guides you to some of the city's most colorful urban art.

Art buffs will probably be drawn to Everett first and foremost to visit AMGRAF, but there's more to do in this cool little city. If you're strolling around town looking for murals, you should keep your eyes peeled for sculptures, too, with works like Don Anderson's stainless steel "Invision II" on Hoyt Avenue. To help guide you, find a sculpture map on the Everett City website. You'll also find contemporary art exhibitions — most of them free — at the Schack Art Center.

Pinned to the beautiful coast of Possession Sound, you can spend an afternoon walking along the waterfront trails at the Port of Everett or catch a ferry to Jetty Island. This 2-mile-long artificial sandbar was initially designed as a breakwater but is now known as a pretty bathing beach surrounded by warm, shallow waters. And in the winter, several ski resorts are within 2.5 hours' driving distance of the town, including The Summit at Snoqualmie and Mount Baker Ski Area, one of America's snowiest resorts. You can also hike through Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, a scenic but unsung Washington destination located roughly 30 miles east of Everett.

If you want to stay in town, accommodation options are aplenty, with hotels by major multinational groups like IHG, Marriott, and Hilton. There are more boutique options, too, like the harbor-facing Inn at Port Gardner and the dreamily named Silver Cloud Hotel in nearby Mukilteo. At only 30 minutes north of Seattle by car, or an hour by bus, Everett is also a feasible day trip from Portland, the coffee capital of America.