92There's a Paleta in Frida's Bouquet
Frida Kahlo portrait mural, with flowers, butterflies and ice-cream-shop treats bursting from her head · painted by Cade Kegerreis, signed on the wall @CADEKEG · year unknown · on the front of Helados La Azteca, 1500 Colcord Avenue at North 15th Street · a commissioned mural for the shop, per the Wacoan, which reports Kegerreis also painted a second Frida for Helados La Azteca on Valley Mills DriveMURAL
Frida Kahlo, dead serious, on the front of an ice-cream shop, while flowers, butterflies and at least one paleta burst out of the top of her head.
Between the shop window and the glass door of Helados La Azteca, just above a band of stacked stone, Frida Kahlo looks straight out at the parking lot. Joined brow, dark hair pinned up under a crown of pink roses, one more rose tucked by her ear, long drop earrings, two twisted rope necklaces, a lilac-and-pink shawl. The face is painted close to photographic, down to a soft pink light on her forehead, and she is not smiling. The top of her head, meanwhile, is in full bloom.
Up out of the roses comes a bouquet wider than the shop window beside it: sunflowers, gerberas, lilies, tulips, a white dahlia, a peach rose, tall spikes of pink and coral, all on pale grey stucco so every petal carries across the lot. A monarch, a blue butterfly and a yellow swallowtail fly loose at the edges. And mixed in with the flowers are a few things that are not flowers at all. This is an ice-cream shop, after all.
It is signed in lilac capitals at lower left, @CADEKEG, and that handle belongs to Waco muralist Cade Kegerreis (it's said keg'-ur-uss). The Wacoan, profiling him, lists this wall among his commissions: Frida Kahlo with popsicles and flowers bursting out of her head, painted for Helados La Azteca at 15th and Colcord, followed by another Frida for Helados La Azteca's store on Valley Mills Drive. If you know his Ode to Oliver on the East Waco walk, all meadowlark, baboon and tumbling acrobats, this nearly photographic face can look like the work of a different painter. He has said as much himself: "I don't have one style."
The building has had a second act of its own. It used to be a liquor store; Mission Waco bought it and renovated it, and in 2019 Eduardo Garcia opened this ice-cream shop as its first tenant. His family's business started in 1998 as a small ice cream and candy shop on Franklin Avenue, and the Garcias come from Mexticacan, a small community in Jalisco. Garcia describes the whole enterprise as a legacy, following in his father's footsteps.
Kegerreis has told KWTX that public art gives people a feeling of belonging, whatever the art happens to be. Here, that looks like a Mexican painter's face on a Mexican family's shop, in a building that used to be a liquor store.
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