Who is dressing the bronze sculptures in downtown Wichita? And who is undressing them?
Years ago, Tamara Gonzales privately came up with a name for the bronze statue of a barefoot businessman standing at Douglas and Main, reading his newspaper with his pant legs rolled up and his feet cooling in a bubbling fountain.
Walter.
As she got to thinking about Walter, she decided he was missing something.
“I don’t know if it’s a mental problem or what it is, but I saw this statue here and thought, ‘He’d be kind of cool with a pair of pants on,’” said Gonzales, a crochet enthusiast and longtime president of Wichita’s 40-member crochet guild.
Pants crocheted in a rainbow of pastel yarn, to be specific.
Now, Gonzales’ desire to dress Walter has morphed into a city-approved, temporary art installation in yarn that’s been turning heads since Gonzales put it up on Friday.
The hard-to-miss project, several years in the making, features colorful crocheted hats, scarves, sweaters — and in Walter’s case, overalls — that Gonzales painstakingly created and then sewed onto many of the 11 bronze sculptures by artist Georgia Gerber that were installed back in 2000 at various spots along Douglas in downtown Wichita.
And even though the installment is scheduled to remain in place until Oct. 1, if you want to see it, you’d better hurry. People are swiping the items nightly, despite Gonzales’s efforts to secure them. She’s able to replace some of them but not all.
“I’m disheartened but not discouraged,” Gonzales said. “I will find a way to do this again next year.”
The itch to stitch
When Gonzales was 10, her grandma Vada taught her how to crochet. It became a hobby that she’d pick up for a few years, then put away, then pick up again.
“I got involved with the quilt guild in Wichita, and I thought I was the only one left in the whole world crocheting,” she said. “But my sister said, ‘There has to be other people.’”
She searched online and found Wichita’s crochet guild, which she immediately joined. They made her the treasurer, then the president, a job she’s now held for about a decade.
In early 2020, Gonzales said, she went to Lindsborg with a friend and saw a lime green bicycle in a shop window. Suddenly, she was hit with the urge to crochet around the wheels of the bike. She asked the shop owner for permission and was advised that Lindsborg’s annual Lindsborg in Bloom event — an April tradition that encourages residents to dress up in 1960s and 1970s hippie garb and enjoy a day of shopping, food and art — would be a perfect time for such a project to debut.
Gonzales couldn’t stop thinking about the event, and she stitched together a bigger plan. Instead of focusing just on that lime green bicycle, she’d also crochet around a few trees, make an outfit for a Dala horse and crochet a covering for a trash can. She got to work, but then the pandemic canceled the event. She doubled down with plans for an even bigger yarn explosion for the 2021 festival and crocheted even more festive coverings for objects in downtown Lindsborg, including a bench and a couple of chairs. A Lindsborg resident even asked her to crochet a covering for his tuba.
She put the installation up in 2021 then did it again in 2022 and this past April. Every year, the display grows, and Lindsborg loves it.
Walter needed pants
One day last year, Gonzales was driving to her job at iSi Environmental, a consulting firm in downtown Wichita. Every day on her commute, she passed “Walter,” and she felt she just had to dress him. Instead of pants, though, she decided on overalls, which would be easier for Walter to keep up.
She decided she’d better get permission from the city of Wichita before she started dressing the bronze statues, though, and eventually was directed to the city’s Design Council, whose job it is to oversee public art. She got approval to dress the statues for two weeks last September, and she again got to work. She crocheted Walter’s overalls plus hats and hoods for several of the bronze women and children featured in the other statues. She even made a scarf for the Carry Nation statue by a different artist that was installed at Douglas and St. Francis back in 2017.
Not long after she tied on the hats and scarves, though, they all disappeared, swiped by people who roam Douglas at night. The only item that remained was Walter’s overalls, which had been sewn onto his body.
Undeterred, Gonzales made bigger plans and went back to the Design Council in August. They again approved a two-week installation.
“Then I just went full force,” Gonzales said.
She crocheted and crocheted and crocheted, and on Friday, she spent the day dressing the statues. Walter’s overalls went back on, and he got a cozy hood, too. The little girl playing hopscotch on the south side of Main and Douglas got a sweater and hat, and so did her little cat.
She also dressed the two kids playing at Douglas and Broadway, the “Girl and Pony” who gaze into the Ruffin Building between Broadway and Topeka and the “Parent and Child,” at the southeast corner of Broadway and Douglas. And she created colorful crochet wraps for several of the trees outside the Chainlink Gallery at 121 E. Douglas. Gonzales estimates the downtown project required more than 20,000 yards of yarn, well over $600 and months of work.
So this year, Gonzales made plans to secure the items, sewing most of them directly onto the statues. By Saturday morning, though, most of them had been swiped, including the sweater worn by the kitty and its girl and all the hats. In one case, a sweater was cut off a statue, which would have caused it to unravel, Gonzales said.
Walter’s overalls and his hat, which was sewn onto his overalls, remained intact as of Monday morning.
Gonzales said she expected that some of the items would go missing, and if someone who needed a warm hat took one, she was more than fine with that. At this rate, though, she wonders what will be left by Oct. 1.
‘Born to create’
On Sunday during the Open Streets ICT event that shut down traffic on Douglas and welcomed bicyclists and pedestrians, Gonzales packed up her yarn and parked herself on a bench at Douglas and Main, right next to the girl and kitty statue. As she sat, she started creating new hats for the sculptures and answered questions of curious passersby.
Their enthusiasm was encouraging, she said.
“They were smiling, and they were just so thankful I was brightening their downtown,” Gonzales said. “It was a good feeling. It made me so happy.”
Gonzales said she gets up at 3 a.m. most days so that she can have some time to crochet before she goes to work at 7 a.m. Crocheting is “tearing up my hands,” she said, but she can’t stop.
For years, she’s made scarves, afghans, coasters, plant holders and whatever else she can dream up. Dressing up a downtown — whether it be Lindsborg or Wichita — gives her a way to direct her croch-enrgy. It also gives her a way to spread her love for the art of crochet.
Gonzales plans to keep up with the Wichita project as long as she can and is already thinking about next year. Whatever is left by Oct. 1, she’ll launder, dry and pack up until next September.
She’s an artist, she says, and yarn is her medium.
“I just have to create,” she said. “I was born to create. I just was.”
This story was originally published September 18, 2023 at 2:50 PM.
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