Community In Color: Kansas City Public Library's Digital Exhibit Spotlights Historic Northeast Murals

Press release from the Kansas City Public Library:

July 6, 2021

It has been nearly 20 years since local artist Dianne Dickerson took brush and paint to a drab railroad underpass in Kansas City’s Historic Northeast, creating what would come to be called the Patriotic Mural.

She drew it like a coloring book, inviting others in the community to help fill in the ribbon of bright red, white and blue stars and flowing stripes. “I was so pleased at the response … the students and volunteers who worked on it and the reaction of the community,” Dickerson says, looking back.

Drive by the viaduct at Ninth and Hardesty streets today, and you can still admire their work – perhaps the starting point of a proliferation of colorful murals and other public art that has become a distinguishing feature of the richly diverse Northeast area. Some 40-45 paintings now adorn businesses, schools and abandoned buildings that once were eyesores. They pop out in local parks. Along city streets. In tucked-away alleys.

More than 30 of those images are spotlighted in an exhibit, Community in Color: Murals of the Historic Northeast, at the Kansas City Public Library’s newly renovated North-East Branch. The collection features high-definition, digitally displayed photographs of the murals and other al fresco artwork shot by Kansas City photographer David Remley.

“These artists generally don’t get recognition or visibility and never, or almost never, receive the kind of cultural validation that an exhibition like this affords. I think it’s wonderful,” says Hector Casanova, an assistant professor at the Kansas City Art Institute and resident of the Historic Northeast for some 12 years.

“This is art that isn’t commodified. It’s decidedly not highbrow – it’s for the people. Nobody needs to pay a price of admission,” Casanova says. “That democratic aspect, I think, is what makes it vital to our community.”

This press release was produced by the Kansas City Public Library. The views expressed here are the author’s own.