BY KEELIN EVERLY-LANG for WEEKLY VOLCANO | 10/9/2026
Mauricio Robalino creates artworks that are larger than life. His colorful mosaics burst with whimsical creatures, tiny details and intricate patterns that weave through abstract characters.
Despite a large portfolio and high-profile public art projects that brighten up Tacoma and the Puget Sound area, Robalino has a down to earth approach to life and art.
Ask him about his artistic medium and he’ll keep it simple: “I just make things.”
Sometimes these things are these large public art pieces. Sometimes they are paintings, drawings, greeting cards, metal and glass sculptures or collages.
Investigate the story behind the imagery in his art, and sometimes you’ll get a colorful story of inspiration. Other times, the story will be much simpler, and he’ll tell you he just saw something that he thought was cool and decided to make his own version.
Robalino grew up in Quito, Ecuador, then moved to England, then the United States.
When choosing a career, he first tried attending business school, but his artistic spirit could not be satisfied with the world of business.
When he couldn’t take it anymore, he told his father that he was going to stop attending the school and become an artist. His father’s response: to throw him out with “120 bucks, a suitcase, and a sleeping bag.”
Rejecting his father’s plan for him also had other consequences for the young artist, aside from losing his tuition.
“I wasn’t born here, but my dad was an American, and so I was under his protection … I came here as a student, I had a student visa, and when I left his house in Georgia with my sleeping bag and all that to go to San Francisco and become an artist, I had no papers. It took me years to get papers,” Robalino said.
Arriving at his friend’s house with nothing, he survived by getting “odd jobs just to eat and stuff … I started taking night classes at a community center for $1 a class, and that’s how I started really developing my skills as a draftsman to draw, and from that I built it up to getting a master’s degree.”
“If you’re not welcome in most jobs because of your weirdness, you have to make your own … I wasn’t thinking about it as a child to become an artist, but it just happened,” Robalino said.
Robalino’s most widely visible art pieces are his large-scale mosaic murals, which can be found all over Tacoma and the greater Puget Sound area.
He is the artist behind the Alberta Canada mural in Hilltop that celebrates the local community leader.
He also has large murals at the Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital, at Point Ruston and on the wall of a local pho restaurant, as well as sculptures outside of the Eastside Community Center and more.
A lot of his work is public art, which becomes a collaborative project with whoever has contracted with him.
For a current project for a school in Lynnwood, Robalino described this process as “I’m trying to make them happy. Trying to make myself happy. So: colorful, whimsical, imaginative, tactile.”
One of Robalino’s first inspirations in life and art was his grandfather, who he said was so much more interesting than school that he would much rather spend time with him.
“He was just really fun and humorous and intelligent and had great stories. He used to live right next door … he had built a solar observatory right on the equator, and I used to go spend time with him there,” Robalino said. “He had a little exhibit there of the seasons, and then he had a botanical garden with plants from all over the world.”
Another big influence in Robalino’s life was a man named Edward C. Lawson, whom he lived with in those formative years in San Francisco after leaving business school.
Lawson was an African American civil rights activist who was the plaintiff in the case of Kolender v. Lawson, 461 U.S. 352 (1983) – a case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a California statute authorizing a police officer to arrest a person for refusing to present identification was unconstitutionally vague.
Robalino credits Lawson for changing his life and his perspective, teaching him how to be resourceful and resilient and to live life on your own terms.
“I want my life to be an adventure … I learned that from him,” Robalino said.
“He was a super interesting person … he used to turn up the music, we used to dance like crazy. He used to hitchhike. When we had no money he used to just do laundry in the bathtub … he was teaching himself to do law because he was tired of being abused by the police,” Robalino said.
Describing him as a mysterious and free person, Robalino said Lawson seemed to need no money to exist and lived by his own values, including not using drugs or alcohol, and found a way to make things worse. His most memorable sentence that he used to repeat was “when in doubt, do it!” Robalino said.
Learning these life lessons from Lawson was part of what fed his motivation in life and as an artist.
Lawson taught him to “just do what you’ve got to do, and that gave me the strength to do whatever I needed to do to get my master’s degree and then be an artist,” Robalino said.
He’s carried this attitude of openness, adventure and resourcefulness with him throughout his career, along with a skepticism of those who pretend they have it all figured out.
Robalino is opening his studio up to the public as part of Tacoma Art Month’s Studio Tours, which will take place from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 17 and 18.
