The Mural Was the Easy Part

Right now, sitting in my livestock trailer, are the frames for a freestanding mural for the town of Windom.

We got the grant last year — $4,000, an Arts Everywhere award from the Kansas Arts Commission. The goal was to have everything wrapped and reported by June 30th, when the state's fiscal year closed. Coordinating a school, a design, and a whole town just takes longer than that. It's two weeks past deadline, and the frames are still unpainted.

(If you pictured something more glamorous than a livestock trailer holding up a state grant deadline, I hate to disappoint you.)

Here's what's left: the frames need paint before the installer can set them, the installer needs to finish before we can cut a ribbon, and the state wants its report by July 31st. None of that waits.

The mural itself came together fast, relative to everything else. The committee met with Kaycee Sutter, the art teacher — who happens to be an outstanding muralist in her own right — and gave her some initial direction. She came back a few weeks later with two concepts. We picked one. (I'm on the committee, for what it's worth.) The real delay wasn't deliberation. It was capacity. The art classes couldn't start painting until April, because the school was hosting the league art show and there wasn't room on the calendar before that. Students painted the bulk of it. Kaycee finished the details herself in early June.

But making the mural was only half the project. Windom has about 90 people in it, no stoplight, and no gas station, and most of who's left is older and already stretched thin. There's no natural crowd waiting around Main Street to walk up on a mural on its own. Half of what we've spent this summer figuring out isn't paint colors or panel hardware. It's when anybody would actually be in the same place to see it.

So we picked July 27th. It's the night of Windom's monthly covered dish dinner (this month's theme is hot dogs, so everyone just calls it hot dog night) and it happens to beat the deadline, too. Windom calls itself the Covered Dish Capital, and one of the mural panels actually pays homage to that tradition. Hot dog night is the obvious time for it to happen.

There's no guarantee anyone turns out for a ribbon cutting on its own. But the covered dish dinner already pulls a crowd, every month, without fail. Our best shot at people actually being there is timing ours to land on theirs.

Plenty of organizations do the hard, real work of making something worth people's time — a program, a fix, a piece of art — and then build a launch from scratch to go with it. Nobody can guarantee a crowd. But you can improve your odds enormously by finding the night people already show up, and timing yours to land on it instead.

Ribbon cutting's July 27th, 6:30pm, at the Windom Community Center. Hot dogs, the whole town, and a mural. If you're anywhere near central Kansas that night, come hungry — I'd love to see you there. And until then, we’ve got some painting to do.

Lori