 "Photo: Peyton McGee; The Daily Texan")
 "Photo: Peyton McGee; The Daily Texan")
At about 4 p.m. on Friday, a beat-up white van pulled into the parking lot of Cheapo Records. Under the blue sky and blazing afternoon sun, a Hispanic male left the vehicle with two plastic cartons containing cans of spray paint.
The man, dressed entirely in black, entered the store. After several minutes, he emerged, smiling, carrying a step ladder and then collected stencils from the van.
This is how local graffiti artist Federico Archuleta prepares for work. Four years ago, Cheapo’s owner Jason Shields commissioned Archuleta to decorate the massive beige walls of the original Whole Foods. Shields allows Archuleta to work at his own pace. In exchange for his work, Archuleta gets free CDs.
“My building is 70 feet of total artistic freedom for him,” Shields said. “As far as I know it’s the largest canvas Federico’s worked on.”
On Friday, he added a flaming, guitar-playing cowgirl to his previous pieces on the Cheapo Records wall, which includes the store’s mascot, a bulldog named Mafesto and at least 10 other colorful images. But his most famous work is a little closer to the heart of the University.
Archuleta is the artist responsible for the stencil-style songsters adorning the exterior of Follett’s Intellectual Property — perhaps his most visible work near campus. When The Daily Texan spoke with the Archuleta two years ago, he was touching up his Janis Joplin, Johnny Cash and Clash images in preparation for the bookstore’s opening.
Now, with the closing of the bookstore near, Archuleta said he wonders if he will have to fight to keep the work that jump-started his career from being painted over — or if the notoriety he has earned as an Austin artist will be enough to keep them intact.
“It was by accident,” Archuleta said, referring to the portraits of the singers.
Between Tower Records’ closing and Intellectual Property’s opening, Archuleta, then the in-house graphic artist, was asked to paint something on the blank walls outside the building. Archuleta drew upon his prior stenciling experience screen printing T-shirts in Fort Bliss as inspiration for the massive project.
He created stencils of the famous faces with an X-Acto knife and cardboard he found in an East Austin auto shop. This process would eventually become the key to his signature self-proclaimed “Tex-Mex-Sexy” style.
Everything was going according to plan until Archuleta left the front of the bookstore to get something from his van. When he returned, something was missing. Someone had stolen Johnny Cash.
“It was a big, 4-foot-by-6-foot [stencil],” he said. “I’m positive that it’s hanging in someone’s dorm room right now.”
Replicas of the original Cash stencil were never quite the same, and neither was that corner lot.
“It got to the point when I was doing the Tower Records stuff that the bums knew my name,” Archuleta said. “When they passed they’d yell out, ‘Right on, Federico.’ The street people were my original fans.”
The work at Tower Records led to a painting job at local bar The Hole in the Wall, including all of the work on the face of and inside the building and a good portion of the work in the bar’s alley. His name, separated into syllables, (Fe De Rico) and loosely translated into English, means rich in faith. This has become his trademark signature.
Archuleta was born in El Paso and was raised in a traditional Hispanic Catholic home. An altar boy in his youth, Archuleta considered priesthood before discovering art.
These days, Archuleta says he expresses his appreciation for his cultural heritage and faith through his graffiti work. His Virgen de Guadalupe stencil, which measures 13 by 7 feet, travels with him.
Archuleta’s Virgen appeared before the general public at Tesoros Trading Company on South Congress. Then the stencil accompanied him to El Paso’s border town, Ciudad Juarez, where he tagged the image on the cement encasement of the Rio Grande River.
“There’s so much violence there,” Archuleta said. “I wanted a pedestrian crossing back to see her, but I had to work fast. She was in four pieces, so spray painting her was sort of like a puzzle.”
“When I discovered the power of public art, I never went back,” Archuleta said.
His passion often leads him to dabble in illegal activities. When he isn’t working on commissioned jobs on churches or bars, he tags public property without proper documentation.
“I try to choose a spot where people can see and appreciate the art,” Archuleta said. “Many times, I do something and risk it getting covered up. I do it because it lifts up the drabbiness of an area.”
Archuleta paints in the morning so that police who drive by think he is doing hired work.
“There’s something fun in the Robin Hood aspect” Archuleta said. “By putting this piece of art outside, it is for the people. You can’t put a price on viewing it.”
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