When Brian Paco Alvarez was asked by Freed’s Bakery owner Max Jacobson-Fried to find a muralist for the inside wall of a new Freed’s Dessert Shop in Downtown’s Arts District, he turned to local artist Shan Michael Evans, whose bold, colorful geometric work is as tasty and tempting as Freed’s cakes and cookies.
Evans’ Freed’s Dessert Shop mural, titled “Cakes on the Brain” (“I’ll spend forever on a title alone, looking for some bouncy word play that reflects infinite cosmic understanding, and I just couldn’t come up with it; Paco had to step in,” Evans explains), features two thematic elements the artist knew the shop would contain: pastry and customers. “I wanted people,” he says of the mural’s stylized heads. “They would be standing in line at Freed’s with you, community and conversation. The cakes, looking like hats, are their thoughts and desires visualized.”
The mural is at once fresh and subtly familiar, like a memory of a childhood dream. Evans drew on a raft of influences to create it, including cartoonist Mark Beyer, and some other unexpected sources: “I’d say Pierrot, the sad clown, is there,” he says. “And though not intentional, I see hints of the [Storm Thorgerson] album cover for Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell.”
The result, Evans says, is one of his favorite works so far. “Go check it out if you can,” he says, “and be sure to grab yourself a slice of cake or a box of cookies.”
FREED’S DESSERT SHOP 60 E. California Ave., 702-989-9899. Sunday-Thursday, 11 a.m.-7 p.m.; Friday-Saturday, 11 a.m.-9 p.m.
