21Metamorphosis

Walk this one slowly, left to right, because it's built like a sentence. The first figure is a storm of scribbled lines — barely a person. The next has more shape. The next, more color. And the final woman is fully painted, hair flying, leaping with her arm stretched out toward a glowing torch.

The wall belongs to Jesus Said Love, a Waco nonprofit that walks with women coming out of exploitation. It's built on the actual sketches of Kathleen L. Slavin, an artist from their community who drew all her life to turn pain into something she could look at, and who passed in 2021. Muralist Will Suarez turned her drawings into what the commission called a becoming — for her, and for the women this city lost. Stand at the last figure a while. She made it.