Lawrence residents add handprints to downtown mural celebrating city diversity

Painted handprints started turning the west-facing wall of the Vermont Street parking garage into something more than public art Wednesday evening: a record of who in Lawrence helped make it. Artist Tokeya Waci U Richardson invited residents into the process at 725 Vermont St., next to the Lawrence Public Library, and guided them through placing yellow handprints in marked spots on the 18-by-10-foot mural.

The mural is designed to reflect Lawrence’s cultural diversity, with imagery that includes the Lawrence Public Library exterior, Native people, the Haskell Indian Nations Memorial Arch, constellations, buffalo imagery and sunflowers. Richardson, who is Oglala Lakota and Haliwa-Saponi, gave a short introduction before helping participants coat their hands and press them into the mural, shifting the project from something people only watched to something they physically shaped.

That participation gives the work a different kind of civic weight. The city’s parking-garage art efforts have been aimed not just at adding color, but at making garages feel less dark and intimidating, more welcoming, and less likely to attract graffiti. In this case, the garage wall became a downtown canvas where residents could leave a visible mark in a place most people usually pass through without stopping.

The selection process behind the mural was meant to broaden that sense of shared ownership. The city set aside a $5,500 budget for the commission and received 12 eligible applications. A review panel that included Parking Manager Brad Harrell, three Lawrence Public Library staff members and members of the Lawrence Cultural Arts Commission chose Richardson after Harrell asked for an equitable artist-selection process for the project.

Richardson’s ties to Lawrence and Native art in the region also helped anchor the project. He previously completed murals for Haskell Indian Nations University, has two pieces on bus shelters in Lawrence, and had his work The Lance and Shield Buffalo Robe selected for the Spencer Museum of Art’s 2024-2025 Native Fashion exhibition. He has said the mural will also include a plaque explaining the meaning of its symbols.

The people who showed up Wednesday underscored that message. Bo Schneider, who is enrolled in the Fort Peck Assiniboine & Sioux Tribes of Montana and is descended from the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska and the Kickapoo Tribe in Kansas, took part, along with Taylor Cook, Navajo/Diné, who helped with the event. Earlier in the project, muralist Mona Cliff also helped paint, adding to the sense that the wall is becoming a community-made marker of identity, memory and belonging in downtown Lawrence.