89Be Still, in Four Languages
“Serve Change Hope Love Mural,” as Creative Waco’s Public Art Map titles it · four portrait panels and a flag column, with Psalm 46:10 lettered in four languages · artist and year unknown — know who painted it? Tell us. · the only mark on the wall is a painted signature, ALSzögi, with ’10 beneath it, at the lower right of the LOVE panel · on the Sanger Avenue side of 628 N. 15th St., at 15th and Sanger, per Destination Waco · 628 N. 15th is the address Mission Waco gives for its Poverty Simulation weekend · no record says who commissioned itMURAL
Four faces, four words and one verse — Psalm 46:10, lettered in a different language on every panel.
Along the Sanger Avenue side of a green-painted building at North 15th, four big panels sit in a brown frame, each with one word painted in black capitals across the top: SERVE, CHANGE, HOPE, LOVE. Under every word is a face, and every face is painted in shades of its own panel’s color: a woman with her dark hair pulled back, in rose and red over a field of red medallions; a man with a heavy black mustache, in blues over a trailing vine; a boy with a sweep of dark hair, in teal over a grid of key-pattern tiles; and a small boy with a half-smile, in lavender over a scatter of stars.
Between the second and third panels, a narrow pale-blue column stacks four hand-lettered names, each over a waving flag: India, Haiti, Mexico, Waco. At its foot, in white: Psalm 46:10. That verse runs along the bottom of every panel, in a different language each time: Devanagari script on SERVE, Haitian Creole on CHANGE, where God is Bon Dieu, Spanish on HOPE, and on LOVE, in English, Be still and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations. A band of plain white paint along the foot of the panels covers a few of the words. The Spanish stops at Seré enalteci.
Destination Waco’s mural list puts this wall at 628 N. 15th St., facing Sanger, and 628 N. 15th is the address Mission Waco gives for its Poverty Simulation weekend, which Jimmy and Janet Dorrell created in 1986 for a youth group and which is still running almost forty years later. Mission Waco traces itself to 1978, when the Dorrells bought a deteriorating house in North Waco. In 2012 it took the name Mission Waco, Mission World, and Mission World is its work with national partners in Haiti, Mexico City and India — the same three countries on this wall. It is the same ministry whose resale shop wears the laundry bridge at the start of this drive.
We have not been able to put a name to the painter. Creative Waco’s Public Art Map lists the wall by its title, Serve Change Hope Love Mural, with no artist and no year, and the only mark on the wall itself is a small black signature at the lower right edge of the LOVE panel: ALSzögi, with ’10 beneath it. So for now: artist and year unknown — know who painted it? Tell us.
More views
