95The Shepherd at 205 South 26th
Hand-lettered panel with a robed shepherd and lamb on The Shepherd’s Heart food pantry, 205 South 26th St · artist and year unknown — know who painted it? Tell us.MURAL
A red-bordered panel of a shepherd carrying a lamb, on the wall of the largest faith-based food pantry in Central Texas.
The painting is quiet and the building is not. The panel is a red-bordered rectangle done in the flat, heavy line of a woodblock print: a robed shepherd, a staff, a lamb held against the chest, and beside it hand-lettered serif type with W A C O spaced out underneath. It would look at home on the cover of a hymnal.
What is behind the wall is the reason to stop. The Shepherd’s Heart, at 205 South 26th Street, moves roughly half a million pounds of food a month. It runs deliveries to homebound seniors, food for students at seven local schools, and eighteen mobile distributions in parts of town where a grocery store is a bus ride away. In 2023 it counted more than 95,000 lives touched in Waco alone. Its programs have since been folded into the Central Texas Food Bank.
So the shepherd on the wall is not decoration and it is not a metaphor the building has to reach for. Nobody signed it. If you know who cut that line work, we would like to say so here.
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