Tsx'vilum

Free

Lummi Nation

Indigenous Public Artist / Muralist / Environmental Storyteller

Indigenous artist working at the intersection of land, culture, and community-scale public art.

View Work

Coast Salish Interactive
Living Mural

Location Downtown Bellingham, WA
Scale 80 x 20 feet
Year 2024
Role Artist and Creative Director

Located in a downtown Bellingham alley near the original Lummi village site Xw'otqwem, this mural honors the stories, presence, and true history of the Coast Salish people on the land where Bellingham now stands. The work features eagle, salmon, and orca alongside traditional ecological technology including reef nets and clam gardens.

Created with the CSSP team alongside Raven Borsey and Roy Nicol, and funded by the City of Bellingham Downtown Activation and Beautification grant.

At night, a projection mapping layer activates the wall as an interactive storytelling dimension, animating traditional stories across the surface of the mural and extending the work beyond what paint alone can hold.
Free Borsey reaching toward the mural
Wide angle view of the Indigiversal Collective Mural at the Bellingham waterfront, Noisy Waters Mural Festival

Indigiversal
Collective Mural

Location Granary Avenue, Bellingham Waterfront
Scale 150 feet
Year 2023
Role Contributing Artist

Created for the first Noisy Waters Mural Festival, this 150-foot work brought together 10 Indigenous artists representing tribal nations across North America. The festival transformed the Bellingham waterfront into a living conversation between Indigenous artistic traditions.

Free's contribution to the collective work draws from a Lummi coyote story, placing traditional oral literature at the scale of the street.

Free Borsey before the Indigiversal Collective Mural, Granary Avenue, Bellingham waterfront
Grounded in the Salish Sea and the traditions of the Lummi Nation, Free Borsey paints murals that return culture to the places it was always meant to be seen. His work is made with community, not for it. Tsx'vilum Free Borsey
About
Free Borsey and Raven Borsey at the Bellingham waterfront, one wearing a traditional cedar hat

Free Borsey (Tsx'vilum) with his twin brother Raven (Xwesultun), Lummi Nation

Tsx'vilum Free Borsey is a Lummi Nation artist, muralist, and environmental steward whose work lives at the intersection of land, culture, and community. Based in Bellingham, he creates large-scale public art rooted in Coast Salish tradition, making Indigenous stories visible at the scale they deserve. His practice spans murals, cultural education, and youth leadership.

Free Borsey grew up on the Lummi Reservation, raised by his uncle and aunt with deep roots in the land and water of the Salish Sea. His childhood was spent fishing, hunting, running in the woods above West Shore, and playing in the tides on the mudflats. That immersion shaped everything that followed.

As a teenager, Free joined a 38-day, approximately 650-mile canoe journey that would become a turning point in his relationship to Lummi culture and tradition. The experience of paddling ancestral waters, of moving through the land at the pace the land requires, became the foundation of his practice as an artist and advocate.

After returning from Olympia at the end of COVID, he joined Children of the Setting Sun Productions, where he spent time traveling to interview elders and community leaders, documenting the knowledge and voices that hold the culture together. That work shifted him toward Native Environmental Science and toward art as a form of cultural preservation and activation, not documentation.

His visual practice blends Coast Salish formline with realism, grounding traditional imagery in the land and ecology that gave rise to it. He describes his art as "a map in a way. It should reflect the land, the people of that territory and what teachings these people received from the land." He brings that orientation to every mural: the wall is not a canvas. It is a piece of land that the story lives on.

Practice

Areas of Work

Large-Scale Murals

80-foot walls to 150-foot festival pieces. Creative direction, team collaboration, and solo execution. Coast Salish formline blended with realism at the scale public space demands.

Indigenous Storytelling and Cultural Work

Traditional oral literature made visible: coyote stories, reef net knowledge, clam garden ecology, orca and eagle. Imagery rooted in the specific territory and teachings of the land.

Environmental Art

Bridging science and spirit. Visual work that holds Indigenous ecological knowledge and makes the case for land stewardship through cultural presence rather than data alone.

Community-Engaged Art

Live art activations, festival participation, youth mural co-creation. The community shapes the work. Free's practice treats the people in a place as collaborators, not audience.

Youth and Education Integration

Bringing young people into the mural process as participants. Cultural transmission through making: elder interviews, environmental education, hands-on art that passes knowledge forward.

Projection and Interactive Media

Extending the mural beyond paint through nighttime projection mapping. Traditional stories animated across the surface of the wall, adding an interactive storytelling dimension to permanent public work.

Experience

Leadership

Across all work

Environmental
Justice Cultural
Revitalization Indigenous
Education
Environmental Stewardship Specialist
Setting Sun Institute / Children of the Setting Sun Productions

Subject matter expert on environmental issues; advocacy, education filmmaking, and community documentation work focused on bridging Indigenous knowledge systems with environmental science.

Artist and Creative Director
Coast Salish Living Mural, CSSP

Led design and execution of the 80-foot mural at 210 W. Holly St., including creative direction of the projection mapping layer and collaboration with Raven Borsey and Roy Nicol.

Contributing Artist
Indigiversal Collective / Noisy Waters Mural Festival

One of 10 Indigenous artists creating a 150-foot collaborative mural at the inaugural Noisy Waters Mural Festival, Bellingham waterfront, 2023.

Board Member
Paper Whale, Bellingham

Cultural accelerator supporting artists and creative communities; live art activations at Northwest Tune Up Festival and Downtown Sounds, 2024.

Youth Presenter
Washington Conservation Action / National Philanthropy Conferences

Represented the next generation of Indigenous environmental leadership at national conferences, speaking to the intersection of cultural revitalization and conservation.

Recognition

Awards & Features

2024
Bullitt Prize
$100,000

Awarded by Washington Conservation Action to environmental leaders under 35 from underrepresented communities. Recognized for work at the intersection of environmental justice and cultural preservation. Funds directed toward reviving the Lummi Youth Canoe Family as a year-round cultural and conservation institution.

2022
American Museum of Natural History

Featured in the Northwest Coast Hall, May 2022. Recognition of his cultural practice and contribution to the living traditions of the Coast Salish peoples.

2024
Washington Conservation Action

Recognized for advocacy in support of the Climate Protection Act and Native voter mobilization, advancing Indigenous environmental priorities at the legislative level.

Community Impact
Humans are the little brother to all the plants and animals. Tsx'vilum Free Borsey

Where the Work Lives

Free Borsey reaching toward the mural during its creation Free Borsey with children at the mural site Children participating in community mural activation
Lummi Youth Canoe Family Revival

The Bullitt Prize is going toward something larger than any single mural. Free and his brother Raven are rebuilding the Lummi Youth Canoe Family, an institution that re-centers Tribal tradition and supports at-risk youth through year-round programming rooted in canoe culture and land stewardship. The 38-day, 650-mile canoe journey Free took as a teenager was his own turning point. This is the work of creating that turning point for others.

Work With Indigenous Youth

Through Children of the Setting Sun Productions, Free has spent years traveling to document elders, record oral histories, and create educational media that keeps knowledge alive and moving through the generations. The mural work extends this directly: young people are invited into the process, not brought in as observers. The act of making is the act of transmission.

Murals as Cultural Infrastructure

The Coast Salish Living Mural is located near the original Lummi village site Xw'otqwem. That is not incidental. Placing Indigenous stories on the walls of the places where Indigenous people have always been is a form of cultural infrastructure, a way of making the land's history legible to everyone who passes through it.

Community Gatherings and Programming

Through Paper Whale and festival programming, Free builds cultural space for the communities his work serves. Live art activations, community gatherings, and cross-tribal collaborations like the Noisy Waters Mural Festival create ongoing points of contact between the work and the people it is made for and with.

Press

Media Coverage

Free Borsey at the Bellingham waterfront
Bellingham Alive
Since Time Immemorial | Tsx'vilum Free Borsey
Read
Free Borsey sketching mural designs
The Planet Magazine
A Balancing Act: Tradition and Change
Read
Free Borsey canoe restoration work
Cascadia Daily News
Lummi Nation brothers win $100K environmental prize
November 27, 2024
Read
Noisy Waters Mural Festival, Bellingham waterfront
Cascadia Daily News
Indigenous artists collaborate on 150-foot painting during mural festival
August 21, 2023
Read
Coast Salish Living Mural, Downtown Bellingham
Cascadia Daily News
The backstories behind Bellingham's 9 newest murals
Read
Capabilities

For RFP Committees

Wall Scale
No Limits

From 80-foot commission murals to 150-foot festival works. Scale is a feature of the practice, not a constraint.

Materials
Paint, Projection, Mixed Media

Exterior and interior paint. Nighttime projection mapping layers. Mixed media installations. Each project uses what the story requires.

Work Mode
Team and Solo

Experience leading creative direction across collaborative teams and executing independently. Comfortable at both scales.

Travel
Available

Available for commissions beyond Bellingham and the Pacific Northwest.

Cultural Scope
Coast Salish and Cross-Tribal

Grounded in Coast Salish tradition, with experience collaborating across tribal nations as part of multi-artist projects.

Community Integration
Standard Practice

Community engagement, youth programming, and cultural consultation are part of every project. The work is not delivered to a community. It is built with one.

Contact

Commission
an Inquiry

Free Borsey is available for public art and mural commissions, RFP submissions, cultural consultation, and community-engaged projects. Use the form to begin a conversation about your project.