63The Wall Where Everything Got Bigger

Somebody made a decision on this wall and committed to it completely. Across a turquoise field, on a bed of prickly pear and enormous soft-petalled blooms, stands an assembly that has no business being together: an Eastern meadowlark mid-song, a rooster in full iridescent tail, a luna moth with wings like green paper — and, right in the middle, calm as anything, a baboon. Nobody explains the baboon. The baboon does not appear to feel it needs explaining.

Raining down around them, tumbling head over heels against the blue, are pink and white figures in leotards, drawn loose and flat like a hundred-year-old circus poster. A white bird dives in from each upper corner. The whole thing is framed in a warm coral border like a proper picture frame, on a plain block wall, on a plain block building, on a street where you were not expecting a picture frame.

It is signed CK in the corner with a web address, under the studio wordmark DVLVD at the top. The wall won't tell you more, but Creative Waco's public art map will: this is Ode to Oliver, painted in 2021 by Cade Kegerreis — CK — for DVLVD. Whoever Oliver is, he got a rooster, a luna moth and a baboon. Nobody gets a better ode than that.