A new public transit hub is being built in Delano. A mural telling the story of Delano’s history will adorn the interior. Artist Lindsey Kernodle is leading a team of artists painting her mural as the building is being constructed. Kernodle is on-site to see the progress and with a community at work on representing the history of the west side of the Arkansas River in Wichita.
“We got base colors down on almost the full thing, but we're focusing on finishing this wall before winter comes,” Kernodle said.
Kernodle explains that she’d be happy painting outside through the winter, but the paint needs to stay above 45 degrees to adhere to the concrete properly.
“They will help us out by putting up some faux walls along these columns to track the heat in, and we'll be able to paint through the winter,” she said.
Kernodle’s mural is being painted inside the Wichita Transit Multi-Modal facility, AKA “The Hub.”
“So this mural is going along the platform walls at the Delano transit hub,” she said. “The bus station that used to be downtown is now being moved to Delano, and it's also going to function as a parking garage and have like electric vehicle charging and rental bikes and all kinds of stuff like that.”
The team helping to bring Kernodle's mural to life consists of a pool of 25 different artists who can sign up for shifts on their own. She says the community is necessary for this work to come to life.
“Today we have about seven or eight, and they're all working pretty independently,” she said. “We have a system for each section with labeled colors so they're able to pull those out each day on the part they're working on.”
One of the artists is more like Kernodle’s co-manager, and she is quick to sing her organizational praises.
“Heather Byers, who's a muralist in town, [has] developed this method where she did a really large community mural on the old Molar’s Camera [building], with the large children looking up at the sky,” Kernodle said.
Byers’ mural is just two blocks east of Grove on Douglas.
“In order to make that efficient, she created all the different colors and labeled them with letters that matched,” Kernodle said. “So it became like a giant color-by-numbers.”
Kernodle points to laminated papers next to the artists with their section of the mural they’re working on. Each section has its own A through Z paint buckets with pre-mixed colors for them to grab.
“But then every 20 feet, it switches into a new A through Z,” she said.
When asked about the project, Byers said she’s been working on the same aspect of the mural for awhile.
“Stripes,” Byers said. “Just stripes. Man, I've been working on stripes for weeks. For weeks.”
The size of the work requires each artist to spend time with each facet of the mural. Sometimes multiple artists will add to any one part of the work.
“It kind of becomes this amalgamation of four different painters,” Byers said. “That fish over there probably had seven different people touch it over the course of a couple of weeks.”
Kernodle’s mural represents the history of Delano, where each artist gets to make their own unique mark.
“This just feels like our little world of just a smaller version of what Wichita already is,” Byers said.
The mural will be completed for the spring and the community grand opening.
