124The Color of Health

This wall was finished in 2019, and it looks exactly the way it is meant to look. On one end, fruit and flowers drawn in plain black outline on white — an apple, a strawberry, a bunch of grapes, a whole citrus wheel — with no color in them at all. On the other, a woman's face, eyes closed, serene, her hair streaming across the building in ribbons of teal and gold, and the same fruit tumbling through it in full color. Look once more at the gold beside her: a second face, a man's, drawn so quietly into the yellows that most people drive past without seeing him. He is meant to be that subtle. Nobody ran out of paint. The change from line to color is the mural.

This is The Color of Health, painted for Waco Family Medicine's MLK Jr. Community Clinic, and the idea comes straight from the people who made it. The fruit stands for everything we take in — what we eat, what we experience, what shapes our health alone and together — and it has no color of its own. It only takes on color, vibrancy and energy through the people. Every human is a work in progress; what we consume is what colors us. It's people that are the true fruit of this community. The design grew out of the crew listening to East Waco's community leaders talk about the strong neighborhoods around the clinic, and about the women who rose up for generations as midwives and nurses to care for this side of town.

The man beside her is there on purpose. Maybe they are a couple; maybe they are patient and carer. Either way the point is the pair — the layered, relational nature of community, the racial history of this neighborhood, and the partnership at the heart of the word family in Waco Family Medicine, who commissioned the wall. The nourishment moves through both of them, and the color of health flows out from them. It is a reminder, in Creative Waco's words, that we are never alone when we do good work that builds community.

Will Suarez was the lead designer, working with Creative Waco's ARTprenticeship: six paid apprentices — Julius Merriwether, Magnolia Oliphant, Maria Quinones-Prado, Kaeleana Ramirez, Daphne Rodriguez and Danielle Stevens — mentored by Susan Sistrunk, Bethany Franzen and Julie Milstead. It shares the clinic with a companion wall, The Spirit of We. Creative Waco's full account of the design is at creativewaco.org/projects/the-color-of-health.

An earlier version of this page described the wall as unfinished. It never was — our thanks to Creative Waco for setting the record straight.