Will Heron’s Intergalacti mural along McKinney Avenue at Bowen Street. (David Taffet/Dallas Voice)

Artist Will Heron painted an LGBTQ-themed mural in Uptown

DAVID TAFFET | Senior Staff Writer
taffet@dallasvoice.com

In the early 1990s, when developers began buying properties along McKinney Avenue, they complained about just one thing: They couldn’t market these new buildings because they were in Oak Lawn.

So the developers came up with a new name for the portion of Oak Lawn east of the Katy railroad tracks, soon to be the Katy Trail — Uptown. The gay bars and restaurants had already closed. And the queer antique store owners were pushed out of the neighborhood.

But now, Meow Wolf has hired Will Heron, who also goes by the shortened Wheron, to reclaim some of Uptown’s queer past.

Meow Wolf is an arts company based in Santa Fe, N.M., that has branched into the Dallas area. Opening this summer in Grapevine Mills Mall will be an interactive experience featuring works by 30 Texas artists. This will be company’s fourth indoor art installation after Santa Fe, Denver and Las Vegas.

In the meantime, Heron represents the company with a three-story mural he painted on the back of 3203 McKinney Ave. That’s on the northwest corner of McKinney and Bowen, facing away from traffic on that one-way street.

Heron calls Meow Wolf “a huge beacon in the arts community of queer acceptance [and] trans acceptance for both employees and people who visit.”

Heron begins his work as pen and ink drawings in his studio. So, he said, he thinks of his murals as giant pen-and-ink drawings.

If you’ve visited Cedar Springs Road over the past year, you may be familiar with his work. He designed the metal undulating barriers separating the sidewalk from the parking lot in front of Alexandre’s. One of the pieces was recently damaged and has been temporarily removed.

In his work, Heron often uses cacti.

“I use cactus throughout all my art work,” Heron said. “I use it as a symbol for my hometown — Dallas.”

He explained he uses plants that are native to Texas. The cactus symbolizes resiliency.

“From a place of brokenness, the cactus will regenerate into stronger, better plants,” he said. “Split it in two to create two new perfect plants.”

In the mural, entitled Intergalacti, the cacti are floating on lily pads.

“Beautiful lotus flowers grow out of muddy, murky water,” he said, which symbolized our current political system.

And the cacti, painted in rainbow colors and trans colors, represent the LGBTQ community that is standing up to political attacks.

“Many queer Texans are rooted here and will continue to live beautiful lives here,” he said.

Heron said the response to the mural has been encouraging. While a few people have questioned why his art needs to make a statement, many more have sent him pictures taken while out walking their dogs or on their way to an area restaurant or bar.

And his response to the negative comments? “That’s art doing what art’s supposed to do — start a conversation.”

The work is Heron’s largest so far at 50 feet high by 150 feet wide. It took a 60-foot cherry-picker boom lift to paint most of it.

“I had to get over my fear of heights,” he said.

The project took four weeks to paint ,and he enlisted the help of a few friends to color in some portions of the work.

How permanent is it? The mural faces a cleared, fenced lot that was owned by Dream Hotels for years but has been recently purchased by a major hotel corporation for a boutique hotel. So the mural will remain, but whether it remains visible is entirely up to the new neighbors and how a new property will be situated.

In the meantime, Heron said, the mural is his love letter to the city where he was born and raised.