73Storytellers

The East Waco Library is a beautiful thing before anybody paints anything on it: a streamline-moderne box from the middle of the last century with a green tower carrying its name vertically down the front. Then the whole facade beside it becomes a mural, and it works in two bands.

The upper band is hand-painted signage, one phrase after another, like a street of shopfronts all shouting at once: CULTIVATE IMAGINATION. E. SIDE PRIDE. A SAFE PLACE TO LIVE. HOME GROWN / RICH HISTORY. tell your story. DRAWING PEOPLE TOGETHER, lettered along a giant pencil. Five diagonal banners — WE ARE Sisters, WE ARE Brothers, WE ARE Neighbors, WE ARE Strong, WE ARE One. And in the middle, four enormous letters in four coloured squares: R E A D — with the acrostic spelled out underneath in a modest little line most people walk straight past: Reading Everyday Advances Dignity.

The lower band is the history. A map with the Brazos labelled. A painted photograph captioned ELM AVE. 1946. The entrance arch of Paul Quinn College. An art class captioned P QUINN COLLEGE ART STUDIO 1916. A youth-vision eye chart that resolves, as you read down it, to FOCUS ON THE DREAM.

It was painted in 2013 by Dave Loewenstein, brought in from Kansas as guiding muralist for the Mid-America Arts Alliance Community Mural Project through Cultural Arts of Waco, with Ashley Jane Laird and Catherine Hart. His method is the reason it reads the way it does: a series of community input meetings first, painting second — and then more than sixty people from the neighbourhood picked up brushes. The wall says what East Waco said. His signature is under the credit block, spelled Loewenstein, which is worth noting because most of the city's own art listings spell it wrong. In the library's front window there is one more panel, added later: a portrait of Lester Gibson, 1949–2022, the first African American elected McLennan County Commissioner, twenty-eight years on the court. He is the man who, back in 2004, paid an artist to paint Dr. King on a bridge pier at the bottom of this hill.