Have you seen these Sasquatch murals around Tacoma? The artist is an icon
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Seattle artist Ryan Henry Ward painted 1,000 Sasquatch murals across Washington.
- Ward freehands designs and has completed 35 commissioned murals around Tacoma.
- City received no complaints; Ward says community response is positive.
Painted on the sides of local businesses, garages and fences around Tacoma are dozens of half-lidded Sasquatches, fanged and often accompanied by other woodland creatures. About a month ago two Sasquatches appeared above the Tacoma Glass Gallery’s sign in Proctor, surrounded by sunflowers and an equally calm-looking squid.
It’s all part of a project from popular Seattle muralist Ryan “Henry” Ward, whose goal this year was to paint one thousand vibrant Sasquatch heads on walls, homes and other public-facing spaces in and around Washington. In less than seven months Ward met his goal — with 25 Sasquatch heads painted in Tacoma. Ward says more than 1,500 owners and businesses responded to his call to participate in the project, which he considers to be “the most expansive public art project in the Pacific Northwest.”
If you drive around Grit City, you’ll see the Sasquatch. There’s a handful in Tacoma’s Proctor District, and more in places like the Dome District and the South End. Ward estimates there’s about 35 total murals of his hidden around Tacoma.
Ward, who grew up in Enumclaw and lived in Tacoma in the early 2000s, said he draws inspiration for his cartoonish characters from books he read as a child. Unlike most muralists, Ward free-hands his designs without projectors or grids. After deciding which character to paint, he follows what feels right and organic, spray-painting his designs in a couple of hours or so, depending on the size and surface.
“I’ve just been a compulsive artist my whole life. I’ve produced a lot of content from a very young age, and a lot of it’s reflective of my own childhood,” he said. “I grew up on a farm and kind of isolated from town, so I had just different relationships and friendships with the farm animals and with my stuffed animals. I kind of had this real daydream kind of childhood, and I think my art is pretty reflective of that.”
Ward painted on average five Sasquatch murals a day over the course of 209 days this year, and some days he painted as many as 10. The ones above the Tacoma Glass Gallery, in addition to a purple Sasquatch on an alley door of the Teaching Toys & Books store, took him an hour and a half to complete.
All of Ward’s pieces in Tacoma have been commissioned, unlike murals by other graffiti artists like Deaf Boy Tacoma and Criminal Sage. Maria Lee, with the city of Tacoma, said the city has not received any complaints about the murals. The city has not funded any of the murals nor received any project funding applications, she said.
“The biggest feedback I get is it brings joy. It makes [people] smile … and I think it has reached a lot of different age groups and a lot of different subcultures,” Ward said. “The facial expressions are sometimes grumpy or the postures of the characters often have a sense of gravity pushing them down. Things like that make it more relatable as cartoons than just like, ‘Yay!’ It’s a little more than just silliness — some complex emotions are kind of hidden in the work.”
As the project comes to an end, Ward said he’s started work on a memoir. In a time of social division, Ward said he’s enjoyed seeing neighbors come out and interact with each other and his art.
“I kind of feel like right now that it is really important for people to just talk in real life to each other and realize that we’re not that much different than each other,” he said. “This whole social media online world intentionally, like, divides us up, and we think that that’s reality a lot of times, and reality is more like our interactions in real life.”
This story was originally published November 21, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
