Love and unity on full display at Parade of Hearts’ 2026 showcase. See inside
The Parade of Hearts were gathered in full force Saturday, April 4, in Overland Park before the sculptures get shipped away to their destinations across Kansas City and the surrounding area.
Out of 700 applicants, 150 applicants were selected , and their complete heart-shaped sculptures were on display at 150 United, the one-day showcase and the only time they’ll all be in one spot together.
The showcase was held at the Overland Park Convention Center for the first time, welcoming over 5,000 visitors. For Parade of Hearts board chair LaVon Colhour, it’s one of the most exciting times of the year.
Saturday marked the first time Colhour had seen any of the hearts, and she couldn’t believe the creativity from the artists. New and returning “heartists” played around with the new keyhole-style sculpture. Each heart brings a different meaning based on the artist’s backgrounds and inspirations, but Colhour said they all aim to unite the community.
“It represents love and unity bringing all of us together,” Colhour said. “I like to say that we’re Midwest nice, so the heart represents Midwest nice, but also it represents the heart of America.”
The design change to move on from the heart with “KC” in the middle was intentional, Colhour said. The organizers broadened how far the hearts will go this year in anticipation of the thousands of travelers coming to Kansas City for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, reaching as far as Lawrence, Chillicothe and St. Joseph.
Colhour said the locations for each heart will be revealed Monday, April 6, on the Parade of Hearts app.
“We’re a vibrant community — our food, our music, our art — so we want to make sure that our visitors from across the pond or wherever they’re coming from have an opportunity to see all parts of Kansas City, and the hearts are a great way for that to happen,” Colhour said.
A culture of hearts
Local artists poured their hearts into the hearts, channeling their lived experiences. For Daniel Heredia, it only made sense to highlight his love for soccer this year.
The first-time heartist’s sculpture is titled “Soccer Unites,” splicing together the sport and his Mexican heritage. It was one of many soccer-themed hearts on display with the World Cup looming over the city.
Split flags of Mexico and the United States are found inside the lining of the keyhole, while a soccer net hangs in the middle. One side of the heart features a soccer ball that’s fresh, while the other showcases the wear and tear, similar to soccer balls he played with as a kid.
Each side features shoutouts to Kansas City’s professional soccer teams of the past and present, and love letters to his family, like a heart drawn by his niece. Heredia said the personal piece took over two months to complete, finding himself still painting on the heart on the day it had to be submitted.
Another heart highlighted the lasting impacts from the redlining of Troost Avenue a century ago, which long served as a dividing line of racial segregation in Kansas City.
Mariah Katherine, originally from East St. Louis, Illinois, and now residing in the Northeast area of Kansas City, said it was important for her artwork to touch on a subject, and what stuck out to the first-time heartist was the inequity in the Black community.
Her heart features the side profiles of two residents wearing Indigenous attire in the foreground, and a map of the city’s East Side, with street names like Indiana Avenue, Holmes Street and Troost Avenue behind them. Bricks lay at the stand, to signify residents laying bricks to build the community up.
“In the Northeast community, they have all these big homes, but we don’t have any historical recognition of black and brown people that have laid the brick,” Katherine said. “I just wanted to highlight that to get people thinking so they’ll go and do their own research on the changes that need to be made so we can all have equality.”
Getting whimsical with the hearts
On top of educating and highlighting pieces of Kansas City’s vibrant community, artists found ways to display their talents beyond painting.
On the showroom floor not far from the Heredia and Katherine’s hearts was Miranda Pietzsch’s “Bits & Pieces,” which drew quite the crowd. The three-time heartist from Kansas City turned her heart into a mosaic, combining broken-down items collected from estate sales into tiny pieces of art about her life, like butterflies and spiders that tell viewers about her love for bugs or the pieces used to create her pet turtle and lizard.
Her past hearts worked to educate the community about endangered animals in the region or other informational bits about the environment, but this was the first time she did a piece about herself, which she said was very challenging. It was also her first time creating a mosaic, another challenge she gave herself since past works were more structured.
“There’s lots of pieces of it that are references to things that are trying to show what my life is like in Kansas City,” Pietzsch said.
A heart near Pietzsch’s took on the form of a musical instrument.
Courtney Crappell is the current dean of the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory. His skills lie within music, but luckily for him, his daughter, Annabelle, has an eye for art. She applied for Parade of Hearts as a solo artist, but after bouncing ideas between each other on what to do, they decided to combine their talents and collaborate for the first time ever on a project of this scale.
Their heart called “The World’s Heartstrings,” features wind chimes hanging from the keyhole. The heart is painted to look like a globe, and the chimes can play melodies from different countries.
The combined artwork also comes with a combined artist name: “Kin”esthesia. It plays on synesthesia meaning — the conflating of one sense with another — with kin, since they’re father and daughter.
“This is a story of us telling you our story while also getting other people’s stories,” Courtney Crappell said. “That’s the beautiful thing about this event. It’s all about that collaboration, togetherness that’s in the spirit of the design and in spirit of this event.”
