Artists from around the globe are painting Kansas City’s riverfront this weekend
Dozens of artists were peppered throughout a roughly 1.5-mile strip of the Missouri Riverfront trail Friday morning to paint their section of the MO River Mural project, put on by PortKC.
Around 100 artists will be working throughout the over 60,000-square-foot concrete levee over the weekend as part of an effort with PortKC to beautify the trail ahead of the World Cup.
“It’s special. It’s more than just coming to paint a wall,” said Ben Watson, creative director of the MO River Mural project.
Port KC partnered with Spray KC to find artists to collaborate with the project, and recruited them both locally and around the world. Each artist or group was assigned a 40-foot section of the wall to beautify more than a mile from the Town of Kansas Bridge (located north of Second and Main streets in the River Market) to the West Bottoms, according to a PortKC news release.
Port KC is hosting a festival to celebrate the arrival of the new artwork over Memorial Day weekend with food trucks, music and more, according to a news release.
“Kansas City is an arts city, and this will be one of the largest mural projects in America,” Jon Stephens, president and CEO of Port KC, said in a news release. “With the eyes of the world focused on Kansas City like never before, there will soon be more than 1.1 miles of murals along the Port KC riverfront trail connecting Berkley Riverfront to the historic West Bottoms.”
“We’re hoping that by having this, this kind of beautifies an area that’s been long underutilized and long underserved in terms of artwork and stuff, so being able to have this for them in a kind of use it as an outdoor space, like a designated area for the spray-painting and all of that,” said Patrick Pierce, spokesperson for PortKC.
Painting the murals is the first step in revitalizing the Riverfront Trail, according to Pierce. Over the next few weeks, the trail will be paved more, and down the line crews will eventually clean up the overgrown foliage to make room for benches.
Ben Watson, 45, creative director of the mural project, considers himself a retired graffiti artist. He now owns mural and signage company Evolution.
“Even though it’s worldwide, we’re all linked to each other in some weird way,” Watson said about the graffiti artist community. “We just basically just went down the line and said, who are respectable people ... and I brought those people out.”
The trail along the riverfront was where spray paint art started in Kansas City during the 1980s, according to Watson. Bringing back some of the artists from those days was a full-circle moment.
“Bringing them back to where it started, the exact spot, we mapped it out from old pictures from the bridge and stuff. You guys were right here, let’s put it right back, right there,” he said about the location.
Public parking for the event over the weekend will be in the City Market. Pedestrians should cross the Town of Kansas Bridge and walk down the stairs to the trail to access the festival, according to the release. Carts will be available for those with accessibility needs.
