Kansas is home to nearly 500 vibrant murals that turn public spaces into powerful works of art.
From rural silos to downtown walls, these large-scale creations celebrate local history, creativity, and community pride. Explore how murals across Kansas are boosting tourism, inspiring artists, and transforming towns.
For Freedy Johnston, the summer 2024 unveiling of the Destination: Home mural on the outside wall of the Midway Market in Kinsley was a festive homecoming.
For the town of Kinsley, the mural’s unveiling was a celebration of a native musical star and a nod to the city’s heritage and pride in its position at the nation’s center, exactly halfway between New York City and San Francisco.
It’s a bold, vibrant mural with a background of blues, golds, and purples and festooned with large and small vignettes of the native Kansas plants and animals, a packed cross-country train, a banner-flying airplane, a windmill, and more.
When examined closely, the Kinsley mural tells many stories. But it will do more than that, according to the artists and organizers who helped create it. The mural, like other murals across the state, will bring in visitors, boost civic pride, and nurture the arts and creativity.
For all these reasons, murals are becoming one of the state’s biggest—literally and metaphorically—art forms.
Hundreds and More
When asked to define what makes a mural a mural, Mindy Allen, a professional muralist from Junction City, replies that a mural can be about almost any theme—from local history to beautiful natural images—and in almost any style. Murals, she says, can go almost anywhere there is some empty space, paint, a painter, and a few good hours for the paint to dry.
It just needs to be beautiful and big.
“I consider a mural anything that uses creativity and could go on a large space,” Allen says. “If you can paint something artistic on a canvas but make it larger—it’s a mural.”
Across Kansas, there are murals on the sides of small cafés and murals stretching hundreds of feet up and down silos and granaries. Usually, murals don’t need licenses, registrations, or permits. And, as a result, there is no official count of the number of murals in the state.
Kansas Tourism (TravelKS.com) maintains a fairly comprehensive website of nearly 400 murals in Kansas. But there are likely more, with the numbers growing every year.
“During my first years, I didn’t see many murals around,” adds Allen, who began painting murals in 2012, “but since 2020, I have seen so many more large exterior murals, especially in rural areas. I think people are seeing the value of murals and how they bring people to your town.”
Community Pride
The theory that murals can increase tourism and civic pride has been confirmed in academic studies of
towns in the United States and across the globe. Closer to home, there’s evidence in areas such as Clay Center and Clay County, where an official map guides visitors to local murals.
“When this started about five years ago, our intent was to install one mural,” explains Brett Hubka, committee chair of the nonprofit A Mural Movement of Clay Center.
But once that first mural was finished, donations kept coming, and the group decided to create more.
“We hit 10 and thought that was pretty cool,” Hubka explains. When people asked for more, donations came in from 20 different states. Clay Center has now raised more than $350,000 and created 32 murals.
One of the most recent murals is a 3,800-square-foot mural by Christian Stanley of C. Stanley Creative. Wrapped around a multistory grain bin, the mural features a charging bison herd against a background of pulsating blues and electric golden hues.
Hubka says while his group has not commissioned a study to examine the correlation between murals and tourism in Clay Center, he sees strong anecdotal evidence.
“We go through thousands and thousands of mural map guides a year, and locals are not using these maps because they know where all the murals are; these maps are going to visitors,” Hubka explains. “We realize murals are an economic driver. They get people to stop in Clay Center, view the murals, grab a bite to eat along the mural trail, and stop at our shops and boutiques.”
As more murals are installed, cities and artists are exploring how the newest murals add something unique while also connecting the community to art and artists.
In Fairview, population 250, visitors encounter a newly created mural at the town’s western gateway. Created by Fairview native Christina Klein, it pays homage to the region’s landscape and wildlife, featuring a heron, a red-tailed hawk, a meadowlark, a honeybee, a firefly, and a cow (modeled by a brown Angus from her father’s Fairview farm) against a north-central Kansas landscape.
Klein also included an homage to a prominent rural Kansas tradition.
“One of my memories growing up in Fairview was attending the church bazaars and seeing the beautiful quilts,” Klein recalls. “So I wanted the mural itself to look like a quilt with different patches coming together. I hope I made that clear and that you can see that, especially on the left side.”
In Chanute, murals have undergone a sort of thematic evolution over the past five years.
One of the first large murals in 2019 paid tribute to the 50th anniversary of an arts and crafts festival with a dramatic sepia-toned collage depicting world explorer Osa Johnson riding a zebra; a rail engine steaming along the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe line; and a daring pilot dangling from an 1896 Chanute glider plane.
More recent murals have become less tied to specific historical references and more focused on the artistic overlap of location and space.
Amy Jensen, the executive director of Chanute’s chamber of commerce and office of tourism, says visitors request directions to all the murals, including a new 3D elephant mural by local artist Gage Guiot.
A Boy, a Guitar, and a Dog
The stories behind each mural are often just as particular to the events and people of that location as the mural itself, which brings us back to Kinsley and the story of Freedy Johnston.
After getting a guitar, starting a band, and performing at his high school talent show, Johnston left Kinsley to study painting at the University of Kansas. He soon transitioned to a career as a singer-songwriter, moving to New York City in 1995 and launching a successful recording career with over a dozen solo albums.
He returned on occasion to Kinsley, but the chance to create a mural in his hometown came about in March 2024 when he applied for a grant to create a work of art on a large scale.
“I had never done a mural before, so the state introduced me to the great muralist Dave Loewenstein as a collaborator,” Johnston recalls.
Loewenstein, who has been painting murals in Kansas since 1991, took Johnston’s initial ideas for a design and helped adapt them for the scope of the mural.
“What a great story!” Loewenstein says of Johnston’s biography and its partial depiction in the mural. “It is truly a favorite son coming home to give back to his community. The fact that we could document that in the form of a mural was heartwarming.”
In its completed form, the east side of the mural (the left side as you face it) features the skyline of New York City, where Freedy resided for many years and began his music career. A beam from the Statue of Liberty highlights animals and plants in a prairie landscape, along with the words “Escape to Kansas!” Along the bottom of the mural, a train brings passengers to the west end of the mural, representing San Francisco. On this side, as a nod to Kinsley’s history as a wintering ground for traveling carnivals, carousel animals rise from the San Francisco Bay. One of them is the spitting image of a childhood pet, Sparky, now immortalized with heavenly wings on his carousel saddle.
“He was a little Jack Russell who lived to be 15. I miss him every minute,” Johnston says.
The spirit of Sparky appeared once more at the mural opening as Johnston honored him by performing his song “Sparky the Heroic Dog.”
The event drew a crowd of visitors and locals, including Marsha Rose Bagby, who arrived wearing her Freedy “Coming Home Again” benefit concert T-shirt from 1998. She says she and her family knew Johnston long before his career launched, and they consider him family. When away at college in Lawrence, he would send recordings of their band playing in a garage, and later, when his career took off, he sent autographed copies of each new CD.
Also present was Father Tim of St. Nicholas Church in Kinsley. He became familiar with Johnston’s music in 1990 while living in Connecticut. At that time, Father Tim, who was from Hutchinson, didn’t know Johnston was also from Kansas and that he would one day serve in Johnston’s hometown, now his own as well.
Johnston still lives outside of Kansas. But part of him is here, in Kinsley.
In the middle of the mural, the spot that marks Kinsley on the train’s NYC-San Fran journey, a grain elevator rises to the sky. On top of that elevator is a small figure, strumming a guitar and singing its heart out as it plays a song for its hometown, a song it will play from now on, each and every day, in the heart of Kinsley.
Support for Murals
Like more than 100 other murals in the state, Kinsley’s Destination Home mural received funding and support from the Kansas Department of Commerce.
The department provides this support through either the Kansas Arts Commission, the Office of Rural Prosperity, or a combination of both.
Kayla Savage, who helped coordinate the Kinsley mural in her role as the director of community engagement at the Department of Commerce, says the state funding almost always comes in the form of a matched grant, with communities helping to cover the cost of materials and payment to the artists through donations or fundraising. In some cases, the state can also assist groups in leveraging national grants.
Savage says the department supports murals because the art contributes to local economies
and pride.
“Murals play an interesting role,” Savage notes. “They are at the intersection of history, culture and something unique and special to each community.”
Communities interested in starting or expanding mural art can refer to the department’s mural website portal, kansascommerce.gov/murals, for information on resources, grants and funding opportunities.
However much the state supports a project, the final mural remains community-focused and community-owned, according to Savage.
“The mural belongs to the community,” Savage says. “It’s theirs throughout the process, and it’s theirs when it is completed.”
