Inside unlit storage unit, a KC artist gave life to a Parade of Hearts sculpture
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Liz Gonzalez turned a self-service storage unit into a 70+ hour makeshift studio
- Parade of Hearts uses new circle-with-heart sculptures; 150 revealed April 4
- Event connects the KC region and raises funds; online auctioning starts in September
Twice, Liz Gonzalez, a 20-something Latina artist in Kansas City, applied for Parade of Hearts, the community project that invites artists to paint heart-shaped sculptures to be showcased around town.
Third time was the charm when she was chosen last year as one of 150 artists for the 2026 event.
It is unlikely that any one of the other 149 artists faced a challenge like the one Gonzalez overcame to bring her piece to life.
She had no work space. No place to paint a 400-pound piece of fiberglass - 6 feet tall and nearly 5 feet wide, sitting on a 16-inch base.
So she turned a storage unit in Johnson County into a makeshift art studio.
Beginning in January she spent more than 70 hours, off and on, inside those metal walls, alone, no electricity, under rechargeable work lights she bought at Lowe’s.
After some scary, after-dark painting sessions, FaceTiming friends and watching motivational TikToks for moral support — and pushing through one tear-filled meltdown — she delivered her finished heart to parade organizers last week, meeting the Feb. 6 deadline.
“It was insane,” she said.
The artists are sworn to secrecy about their finished pieces. Until the official unveiling at a public event in April, the hearts are hidden inside a local warehouse.
But Parade of Hearts last month posted a teaser hinting that Gonzalez’s piece reflects her Mexican-American heritage, the focus of most of her artwork.
Living back home with the parents
When Gonzalez applied for Parade of Hearts last year she was living in a rented house — with a garage — in Independence, proud to be on her own at age 27.
She works for E-Z Lettering Service, though her goal is to some day make a living from her art, which she creates under the name Zelaznogzil.
She planned to use that garage as her studio, but her landlord decided to sell the house. Gonzalez had to be out by Nov. 1, just days before she was to pick up the heart sculpture she would work on.
Her parents invited her to move back home to Wyandotte County and work in their basement.
“I’ve been on my own for years now and I’m 27, so just going back home and relying on my parents just felt very weird,” she said. “It was hard not to feel like a setback. So I was, OK, I’ll work on it in the basement, it’s not really a big deal.”
Even though the artists were given dimensions, she was kind of shocked at how big the heart was when she picked it up at the warehouse.
“I’m like, oh my gosh. This feels kinda surreal,” she said. “I knew it was going to be pretty tall but I didn’t expect it to look like that. Even though it’s only 100 pounds, because of the size of it, it makes it awkward to carry so it feels much heavier than what it is.
“So we transported it all the way to the house, just for it not to fit through the door.
“We did the measurements, but we didn’t take into consideration that there are wooden wedges bolted into the bottom base of the heart to make it easy for them to forklift off and on trucks. But those wooden things did not fit the dimensions of the door.”
She tried removing them but the heart still wouldn’t fit through her mom’s basement door. “It was going to scratch the sides of it, but it wasn’t worth it,” she said. “We had to load it back into the truck, without a forklift. It took four people to lift up.
“Then I was like, OK, let me see what I can do. So I went online and found a storage unit where it’s self-service.”
‘It was ... a mental challenge’
The storage place was a 20-minute drive from her parents’ house. The outdoor unit was heated and cooled but only warm enough to keep her specialty mural paints from freezing.
She had to bundle up in hoodies and sweatpants to work in there.
She had to recharge the LED work lights every three hours. She also bought an extension cord and plugged a small electric heater into an outlet outside the unit.
“I’m not sure if I was or wasn’t supposed to use it because it was outdoors,” she said. “I was like, until they tell me I can’t do this, I’m just going to go ahead and plug it in.
“But I didn’t get the heater until maybe mid-January. So before that I was rolling up the door, getting some sunlight in, putting up the lights when I could.
“It was a lot of, honestly, mental (challenge). It just made the project a little bit harder because I had to mentally prepare myself to recharge these lights, to be in the cold, to not have a bathroom.
“There was a QuikTrip luckily like five minutes away. But you have to mentally prepare yourself to not drink much, not really eat that much ... because I hate using public bathrooms.”
The place got scary at night after the office closed at 6 p.m. “By the time I got there, there was nobody in the office,” she said. “There were a couple of lights near the storage until I had because it was close to the office. But other than it was pitch black after six.
“It was really scary because I would open the (unit’s) door to go to the bathroom and sometimes I would just get this feeling that oh my gosh someone was watching me. But it was just because it was dark. I never saw people. I would hear people drive by but my gate was closed when it got dark.”
A new heart to welcome the world
She enjoyed more comfortable working conditions when she participated two years ago in a public art project in Chicago, where she and other artists painted large-scale renditions of Olmec heads — iconic symbols of an ancient people who lived in Mexico before the Aztecs or Mayans.
It was her first work in 3D.
“Oh my gosh, the people in Chicago, the culture, I was able to meet so many hard-working immigrant families who would come out and give us food and say thank you for representing us,” she said of the project.
“And I was like wow, I kinda want to get into working on murals or more projects that are open to the city because I feel like that sense of community is different from painting on canvas.”
That’s why she was so happy to be chosen for Parade of Hearts. She knew what the motif would be as the daughter of immigrants who inherited her Mexican grandmother’s love of art and was taught to do everything in life with heart.
“I wanted a representation of basically our people here,” she said. “I feel especially for Mexican-Americans, it’s kind of a battle of feeling like you’re too Mexican for Americans and too white for Mexicans. So we’re caught in this hard in-between of feeling Mexican enough to represent our culture.
“So I wanted to just make a piece that would kind of remind us that we’re Mexican whether we’re here, we’re there. I think that it’s something that we carry in our hearts.”
The Parade of Heart artists — “heartists,” as they’re called — are given creative free rein, for the most part. They must steer clear of corporate logos, avoid trademark infringements; no political messages allowed.
This year they worked on a newly designed sculpture. Instead of a solid heart, the sculptures are circles with heart-shaped centers. People had been wanting something different. “We heard that loud and clear,” said Jenn Nussbeck, executive director of Parade of Hearts.
After taking a break last year, organizers decided this year seemed a good time for change with the FIFA World Cup coming to town. After this year, Parade of Hearts becomes a biannual event, with the next scheduled for 2028.
Just as they do for the artists, the group put out a call for designers to create a new-look sculpture.
“We even went to KU’s architectural school and other firms. We had 32 submissions,” Nussbeck said. “We didn’t give them a lot of guidelines. We just said we wanted them to feel globally welcoming and it had to be heart-centric.
“We still wanted it to be a blank enough canvas that the artist didn’t feel compelled to focus on the heart, and or soccer. So the big circle around it is what we describe as a global welcome and it’s whatever they chose to do with that circle.
“And the keyhole heart is ... showing the rest of the world how big our hearts are.”
That empty space in the middle has apparently inspired several of the artists.
“We have quite a few hearts that have added elements to the statue itself,” Nussbeck said. “Some are 9 feet tall, one is 18 feet wide. It’s going to blow people’s minds.”
The hearts will be revealed to the public in an all-day showing on April 4 at the Overland Park Convention Center, where people can meet the artists, too.
The message to the public, Nussbeck said, is that Parade of Hearts, which raises money for local nonprofits, supports the entire Kansas City region, not just one side of the state line.
The Monday after the event, all 150 hearts will be put in place around the region, said Nussbeck, who mentioned Chillicothe in Missouri and De Soto in Kansas.
“There are so many, many small communities and cities in our region that don’t get to get connected,” Nussbeck said. “This is our way of connecting them through our hearts.”
Parade of Hearts will also launch a new mobile app that will continue on as a regional tourism app after the event. The online auctioning of the hearts will begin in early September.
When people see her heart, Gonzalez said, she wants them “to just feel at home, if that makes sense.”
“I carry Mexico wherever I go, even though I wasn’t born there. Because I feel like it goes through generations and it’s something that you carry in your blood. I feel as Mexican-Americans it’s our duty to plant those seeds and share our culture so it doesn’t die down.
“So for me I want them to look at it and feel like I’m planting roots. I planted down roots to our culture to be shared. And it’s your job to do whatever you want with it.”
Even if, for the time being, going back to your roots means moving back home with mom.
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