Two New Initiatives, Funded by the City of Bellingham and Tourism Grants, Bring Attention to Available Spaces Through Immersive Installs & Student-Led Displays
Two new public art initiatives developed by Bellingham-based cultural accelerator Paper Whale and funded by a downtown tourism grant from the City of Bellingham are bringing large-scale art and public attention to a variety of vacant retail spaces throughout the city’s commercial core this spring and summer.
Paper Whale, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit on a mission to cultivate creative community and activate placemaking through multi-sensory events and public artworks, developed the Immersive Experience Project and Windows Alive! programs with the goal of inviting community members and local entrepreneurs to explore and imagine new possibilities for otherwise overlooked and underutilized spaces.
“Our goal is to create a more vibrant community through engagement, inspiration, events, and placemaking,” said Nick Hartrich, executive director and co-founder of Paper Whale. “We asked ourselves, why let these commercial spaces sit empty?”
To bring the Immersive Experience Project to life in four vacant retail spaces, Paper Whale selected four proposals from an array of 19 submissions by local artists, tasking each finalist with transforming a vacant space into an alternate reality. The spaces will be open to the public during evening art walks on the first Friday of each month from May through July, as well as for other select downtown events and additional openings to be scheduled.
For Windows Alive!, Paper Whale and Western Washington University’s Department of Design created a syllabus to engage 18 senior-level design students in the art of public engagement. Six designs were selected for implementation from work by four student leads, while the entire class collaborated on bringing the final illustrations to life. The street-facing installations were completed by Stickers for Days and are expected to remain in place for the next several months, fostering a sense of vibrancy and renewal throughout downtown.
Together, the two initiatives demonstrate something Paper Whale has been working from its inception in 2022 to showcase—the unique breadth and depth of the creative community in Bellingham, and the magnitude of its potential impacts on the city’s future.
For more information about the programs and to view locations and scheduled event dates, visit paper-whale.com/immersive and paper-whale.com/windowsalive.
About Paper Whale
Paper Whale is a 501(c)(3) non-profit and Bellingham-based cultural accelerator on a mission to cultivate community through multi-sensory events centering creativity and placemaking. With a background of more than 25 years of event production and community-building experience, the Paper Whale team is dedicated to elevating Bellingham’s cultural development through curiosity-driven, quality-executed productions. Learn more and get involved at www.paper-whale.com.
