Tulip City Walls Mural Festival

3sixty x Cornerstone Youth Ministry • Holland, MI • 2025

Holland’s Eastcore neighborhood is a lovely, vibrant place. Unfortunately, there has been a decades old stigma that the area is “dangerous” due to lower income families, a few one-off incidents, and frankly, a lack of whiteness. That’s why the local nonprofit, 3sixty, started Tulip City Walls, a mural festival to reclaim the narrative and show Holland that Eastcore is a wonderful place to live and visit.

For the cities’ fourth year of the festival, Cornerstone Youth Ministry invited me to illustrate the Bible verse, “love thy neighbor as thyself.” I modernized the language and brought in elements of the neighborhood that folks would recognize. As the mural was installed, people came out to tell me how much they needed to see the message and how it brought much needed joy and pride to the street corner. Painting this piece truly reinforced the purpose behind what I do.