You're My Butter Half

A slice of bread on one side, a pat of butter on the other, a red heart between them, and a pun underneath. John Rockwell and the team from the Austin agency Creative Suitcase painted this on the east wall of the United Way for Greater Austin building on Martin Luther King Junior Boulevard in 2012, as part of a rebranding job for the charity. They volunteered two days to do it. Rockwell has said the idea came out of his teenage years working at a dairy in Wisconsin. Whatever the source, it turned into one of the most reliably used backdrops in the city, in a stretch of East Austin that visitors had little other reason to stop in, and it long ago outgrew the campaign it was made for. The image now turns up on coasters, magnets, shirts and posters sold all over town. It has been defaced at least once and repainted each time, which is close to the standard life cycle for a beloved Austin wall. The murals people actually visit here tend to be like this one: painted quickly, for a specific and fairly modest reason, by someone who had no expectation that anybody would drive across town to stand in front of it. The setting has changed more than the painting has. This part of Martin Luther King Junior Boulevard runs through the historically Black and Mexican American east side, the area on the far side of the line drawn by Austin's 1928 city plan, which pushed non white residents east of what is now Interstate 35 by placing their schools and services there. The blocks around the mural have redeveloped hard and fast in the years since it was painted, and the wall is now one of the older things on its own street.