45The Teenagers on the Hotel
“Wildflowers II” by Kamea Hadar with Creative Waco’s ARTprenticeship apprentices, 2023 · mentor artists RJ Jones, Dominic Villa, Bradley Settles, Elvia Leyva, Naomi Canale and Rianna Alvarado · Hotel HerringboneMURAL
Waco high-schoolers got paid to help paint a mural of themselves. With an international legend.
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.
The mentor crew who worked the steel beside Hadar: RJ Jones, Dominic Villa, Bradley Settles, Elvia Leyva, Naomi Canale and Rianna Alvarado — the same team behind Wildflowers I, the poppies on the brick under the hotel's QR wall.
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