Here's a question almost nobody asks while they're standing in a parking lot photographing a wall: who did this?
You're driving through downtown Waco. And then — this. A Van Gogh sky being whisked by a giant egg beater. A hotel wearing the faces of two teenagers. A soda museum wrapped in a block-long love letter to strangers. Somebody climbed that scaffolding in a Texas July. Somebody mixed that exact shade of teal. Somebody stood on the sidewalk at the end, covered in paint, and watched people walk past without wondering.
So let's wonder. Because the answer to "who paints Waco?" turns out to be the best story on the whole trail.
The teenagers Creative Waco pays to paint
Start with the part that sounds made up: in Waco, high-school students get paid to paint murals.
ARTPrenticeship is an eight-week summer apprenticeship run by Creative Waco, the local arts agency that supports more than 300 artists a year and has put over a million dollars of public art into downtown. Since 2018, area high-schoolers have earned a real stipend to take a wall from first sketch to final brushstroke, shoulder to shoulder with professional artist mentors. The idea came home from a 2017 civic trip to Cincinnati, where Waco leaders saw teenagers painting that city and thought: ours could do that. In its first five years, the program put up six exterior murals and one interior wall, made three documentaries, hired seventy-plus students, and pulled in thirty artist mentors.
And in 2023 it produced the most quietly astonishing wall in town. At Hotel Herringbone, Hawaiian portrait master Kamea Hadar painted two enormous faces onto the black steel of a shipping-container hotel — and the models were two of the apprentices themselves, Ainsley Guy and Nayeli Flores. Waco teens spent a summer painting a world-class mural of themselves. Some cities give students a certificate. This one gives them a wall.
Will Suarez, the muralist who'll make your coffee
If Waco muralists had a dean, it would be Will Suarez. Waco-raised, University High grad, and the lead designer on ARTPrenticeship's very first wall in 2018 — he's still mentoring the program's crews, including its 2024 wall out at Cameron Park Zoo.
His own masterpiece hangs over the Union Hall parking lot: a swirling Van Gogh night sky being whipped up by a giant vintage egg beater, every star painted as an egg yolk. The real title is "Feed Your Body, Feed Your Soul" — we just call it our Starry Night, sunny side up. And here's the trick no other city can pull: walk twenty feet inside the food hall and the man who painted it will sell you a coffee. Suarez co-owns KurbSide Coffee, where the best seller is his own Dirty Horchata. Oh — and he has two Grammy nominations for album design. The guy pouring your horchata has been up for a Grammy. Twice.
He also left the city a pep talk: KEEP GOING, painted with Joe Rooster in the summer of 2020, over a wall that had been vandalized. The best revenge on graffiti being better graffiti.
Homecomings and a TV crew
Mick Burson is a Waco native who built a serious art career out in Albuquerque — and came home to paint. In 2021 he designed the block-long wrap on the back of the Dr Pepper Museum with ARTPrenticeship's student crew, all vintage soda Americana: a vending machine the size of a house, floating bubbles, a starburst clock pointing at 10, 2 and 4. The title is the friendliest sentence ever painted on a soda factory: "If you feel up to it, you should introduce yourself to a stranger today." He'd already left Waco a mural on Austin Avenue back in 2014, before most of the trail existed.
Then there's Brad Settles, who climbed the scaffolding behind the Hippodrome in 2021 to turn a windowless stage wall into The Gift — enormous Cameron Park leaves tied with a painted bow, deliberately unsigned, because a gift doesn't need a name tag. A Magnolia Network camera crew filmed the whole climb as the pilot episode of Public Artist, the 2022 series host Ruben Rojas described as "a love letter to street art across America." Two summers later, Settles was back on the scaffolding as an ARTPrenticeship mentor. That's how this town works: the walls keep folding their painters back in.
The wall the students asked for
One more, and we'll tell it the way it deserves.
On the downtown walk there's a long dark wall painted as a giant's bookshelf. The spines read CHOOSE HOPE. Love Yourself. Don't Ever Give Up. At the end sits a framed picture where two hands form a heart in the middle of the word JOY. We call it The Wall That Talks Back. It was painted in 2022 with Austin muralist Devin Watlington — a Baylor-trained artist whose studio's own count tops a thousand murals nationwide — and the youth of Communities In Schools of the Heart of Texas.
Here is the part to carry with you. When those students were asked what Waco's walls needed to say, they chose teen suicide prevention. Their topic. Their words. The tall purple spine on the shelf holds their whole message:
THE EPIC STORY OF TOMORROW CAN'T BE WRITTEN IF IT ENDS TODAY.
Teenagers wrote that for other teenagers, then painted it nine feet tall so nobody would have to find it by accident. If you or someone you love needs more than a wall, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline answers calls and texts any hour of any day. And if you just need the wall — it's there, holding the shelf steady.
So: who paints Waco? Paid teenagers. A Grammy-nominated coffee shop owner. A hometown kid back from New Mexico. A man a TV network followed up a wall. Waco artists, painting Waco — the city doesn't import its murals, it grows them.
Every wall in this story is outdoors, free, and a short walk from the next one. Take the Waco’s Walls trail and shake hands with all of them in an afternoon — and when you're done, the Sculpture Zoo trail is waiting with a whole different kind of menagerie. Bring somebody. Introduce yourself to a stranger today. The wall said it was fine.