![]() Leavenworth put up a new mural this summer illustrating the town’s history. The Salina Kanvas Project recently raised $250,000 to bring artist Guido Van Helten all the way from Australia to cover one of the town’s grain elevators with hyper-realistic depictions of local children. “Quality of life, art, travel and tourism, marketing your community,” she said, ”all of those things really go back to economic development.”Īnd more and more towns are beginning to think that way. And they fielded logistical questions from the visiting towns like what their murals cost per square foot, where they found the artists and how they raised the money to pay for everything.Īs someone who grew up in Clay Center, Stark is glad to see more small towns willing to take these kinds of risks in the name of preserving their futures. Shannon Stark, chamber of commerce director for Clay Center, and other local leaders compiled a handbook for towns that want to follow in their footsteps. When her foundation put together a recent workshop in Clay Center to teach other Kansas towns how to start putting up their own murals, Penner ended up welcoming attendees from 30 different places across the state - from Burlington in southeast Kansas to Meade and Norton in western Kansas. “The trend to utilize (murals) as an economic development tool … to bring people in, to improve quality of life,” she said, “that’s on the rise.”Īnd Penner credits Clay Center, a north-central Kansas town with just under 4,000 residents, as the place that launched a thousand paintbrushes. Murals in rural Kansas go back at least 100 years, to companies like Coca-Cola commissioning artists to hand-paint advertisements on brick walls.īut Marci Penner, executive director of the Kansas Sampler Foundation, said the idea of outdoor art as a means for boosting a small town’s bottom line and staving off population loss has now become, well, trendy. “It gives you a sense of place,” Miller said, “and it's another way to bring people together.” Mural movement crosses Kansas Miller said that’s not just good news for local artists, but also for anyone else who calls western Kansas home. And the town has already collected roughly half of the donations and grants it’ll need to reach its $150,000 goal to pay for the endeavor. Miller’s wall is the second in a line of several murals that will go up on local buildings, from the thrift shop to the sushi restaurant, over the next year.īranded as Brush the Bricks, the series will culminate with a community art project that invites residents to paint part of Hays’ grain co-op. ![]() ![]() “It's just kind of a different animal,” he said, “a different process.”īut around Hays, this type of scene is becoming increasingly common. Then there are the long days of taxing physical work to actually brush the paint onto a building instead of a canvas. There’s the math it takes to accurately enlarge his original four-foot by two-foot painting to fill this wall. Translating his art to such a grand scale has been a months-long process that’s come with plenty of challenges, many of them conquered while standing on a scaffold five feet above the sidewalk. Miller, an artist who has lived and worked in Hays for the past 10 years, is putting the finishing touches on a painting that depicts Indigenous bison dancers from tribes who once used the western Kansas plains as hunting grounds. And as more towns blaze this artistic trail, the economic benefits of murals - and the roadmap to getting them done - come into focus. “I could probably about bust into dancing right now.”įrom Hays to Great Bend to Lecompton, small towns across the state increasingly turn to larger-than-life works of art to inspire pride among residents and attract tourists. “I still need to make that brightest highlight a little brighter, but it’s close,” he said. It’s so large that he has to take a step back every once in a while just to get a good look at his progress. ![]() Now, it’s his giant concrete canvas - 13 feet tall by more than 18 feet wide - for painting one of the northwest Kansas town’s new murals. The wall in front of him used to make up the plain, gray side of a local glass shop. HAYS - Matt Miller slowly walks backward into the middle of 5th Street in downtown Hays. ![]()
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