23The Teenagers on the Hotel

Two enormous portraits on the black steel of Hotel Herringbone: a red-haired girl glancing back with a cream cowboy hat, and a dark-haired girl in a crown of wildflowers holding a single poppy. The lead artist is Kamea Hadar from Honolulu — co-founder of POW! WOW!, the mural movement that's put up nearly a thousand walls around the world; his most famous piece is a two-story Obama portrait painted over the text of a speech.

But here's the Waco part, and it's the best part: the faces are local teenagers. ARTPrenticeship — Creative Waco's paid summer crew of high-school artists — helped paint this wall, and two of the apprentices, Ainsley and Nayeli, modeled for the portraits. Read that again. Waco kids spent a summer painting a world-class mural of themselves onto a hotel. Some cities give students a certificate. This one gives them a wall.