Most murals get painted in obscurity — an artist, a wall, a week of sunburn, and if they're lucky, a ribbon cutting covered by nobody.
The six-story mural on the back of the Waco Hippodrome got a film crew.
When Chip and Joanna Gaines launched the Magnolia Network in 2021, one of its very first shows was Public Artist — host Ruben Rojas called it "a love letter to street art across America." And for the pilot episode, the show didn't fly to Los Angeles or Brooklyn. It pointed the cameras at a brick wall in downtown Waco and asked a question this town was very ready to answer: what should go here?
Four artists, one wall, a straw vote
The setup was a hometown competition. Four artists submitted designs for the Hippodrome's towering stage wall — the blank six-story brick canvas facing Franklin Avenue at Eighth Street — and Wacoans got a say, with a straw vote held right at the Hippodrome. The Waco Tribune-Herald covered the whole thing: the designs, the vote, the scaffolding, the reveal.
The winner was Waco artist Brad Settles, with a design he called The Gift: a cascade of entwined leaves and vines, tied together with a white bow, based on a painting he'd made back in 2017. His inspiration was Cameron Park — Waco's great green sprawl — and the idea underneath was bigger than botany: many different leaves, woven into one living whole. A collective making a single thing. A city, in other words.
Six stories of leaves, one white bow
Then he had to actually paint it — six stories up, on camera, leading a painting team through the whole enormous job while the crew filmed every lift of the boom. The episode follows the design, the logistics, the weather, the doubt, and finally the moment the wall stops being brick and starts being The Gift.
The bow is the genius stroke. Without it, you have a very large, very pretty botanical painting. With it, the entire Hippodrome — Waco's 1914 grand old theater — becomes a wrapped present, handed to anyone walking down Franklin Avenue. A gift, from the city, to the city, painted by one of its own.
The Magnolia effect, painted honest
Here's the thing worth saying plainly: whatever brought you to Waco — the Silos, the show, a wrong turn on I-35 — the town you found when you got here is bigger than television. The Magnolia story and the Waco art story braided together on this wall, publicly, in the network's very first season. A national audience watched a Waco artist win a Waco vote to paint a Waco landmark with a design about Waco's park.
That's not a backdrop. That's a town introducing itself.
Go collect the downtown set
The Gift is Stop 33 on our Waco's Walls trail, and it anchors an absurdly rich few blocks. From the Hippodrome you're a short stroll from a genuine Blek le Rat stencil — yes, the Frenchman who taught Banksy everything, on a wall in downtown Waco — plus the JOY bookshelf wall, the courthouse legends of Franklin Avenue, and a dozen more stops with stories we've written down properly.
Start with the Waco's Walls trail, or see every artwork in the city at once on The Whole Map. It's all free, all walkable, and all proof of the thing this wall says in six stories of paint: nobody here makes anything alone.