Wichita bike path art project to provide neighborhood history also

It began as an idea to bring art into the community.

Three rest plazas along the Redbud Bike Path in northeast Wichita will now not only bring art into the community, they will tell the stories and legacy of the people who live in those neighborhoods.

A $2 million bike and walking path in northeast Wichita calls for three rest areas along the bike path – one at Hillside and Ninth, another at Oliver and 17th and the third at 13th and Roosevelt near the MacDonald Golf Course.

“A group of artists were brought together to brainstorm,” said Tina Murano, a Wichita artist who is helping to gather and coordinate the plaza projects. “The bike project was already in the works, and the art project was moved to the bike path.”

Murano, whose studio’s portfolio includes the brightly colored works of “The Kansas Legacy” at Grove Park, the Welcome Plaza at Murfin Animal Care Campus in north Wichita and the “Floating Lilies” at Central Riverside Park, began attending local neighborhood association meetings letting people know she was looking for stories and photos of northeast Wichita. Other artists include Phil Meyer at the Baughman Company; Norm Terry, project consultant; Charles Davis; Janice Thacker; and Todd Whipple.

Murano has gone into the third- through fourth-grade art classrooms of Adams Elementary and Spaight Science and Communications Magnet – the schools closest to the 2.5-mile bike trail – to enlist the help of students by having them stamp and decorate tiles.

Some of the neighborhoods include some of Wichita’s most prominent African-American families. Ever since Wichita’s founding, African-Americans have been part of Wichita and included some of the Exodusters – former slaves – who fled the South for states such as Kansas, Illinois, Missouri and Indiana from 1877 to 1879. Others came later, in the early to mid-20th century, as Wichita aircraft plants drew workers.

The plazas, Murano said, will most likely not only tell the stories of the Piatt Street Plane Crash, a deadly crash of a KC-135 tanker on Jan. 16, 1965, near 20th and Piatt, but also the success stories of famous athletes such as Lynette Woodard, an Olympic basketball champion and the first woman to play on the Harlem Globetrotters; and Barry Sanders, Heisman Trophy winner and Detroit Lions running back.

One of the plazas will be dedicated to the Dockum Drug Store sit-in. Wichita was the first city in the nation to have a successful sit-in. Late in the summer of 1958, 10 members of the youth chapter of the NAACP staged a sit-in at the lunch counter at the Dockum Drug Store on the southeast corner of Douglas and Broadway. Their nonviolent effort resulted in Dockum and eventually other Rexall stores across the state providing seated service for blacks.

But Murano is also hopeful the art plazas will also tell the stories of more common residents and tales within the neighborhoods.

“My original concept was to gather photographs and stories of individual people in the neighborhoods,” she said. “The idea was to gather small stories, like ‘I had an auntie who lived at this address and always had a garden. We would snap peas on the front porch.’ Those were the kind of stories I went to neighborhood meetings in search of.”

City Council member Lavonta Williams said Wichitans feel an appreciation for their northeast neighborhoods.

“I am hoping the community as a whole has an appreciation for some of the art and fantastic artists who live here,” Williams said. “It truly is a community project, and I love the fact it is involving young people and the community at large.”

This story was originally published June 14, 2015 at 7:27 PM with the headline "Wichita bike path art project to provide neighborhood history also."