Kansas University professor of scenography Mark Reaney will be a new feature to this year's Art in the Park on Sunday at South Park. Although he doesn't smoke cigars, Reaney has taken it upon himself to craft amplifiers and guitars made from cigar boxes and various other found objects. He is pictured in his Lawrence home on May 3, 2017.

In the whimsical hands of Mark Reaney, cigar boxes can take on elements of found-object, kinetic and folk art, but it’s the ability of the throw-away objects to make music that inspires him.

“The idea of making something useful out of junk appealed to me,” he said of the cigar box musical instruments he will offer at Sunday’s Art in the Park.

It’s also art of a different scale and nature from the scenic and lighting designs Reaney provided for such University of Kansas Department of Theatre productions in recent years as “Angel Street,” “Picnic,” “The Marriage of Figaro” “The Doll House” and “Little Women.” The KU professor of scenography will be one of more than 100 vendors from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday at South Park for the Lawrence Art Guild Association’s Art in the Park with a booth of guitars and various other musical instruments he crafted from used cigar boxes.

“It’s something I wandered into,” Reaney said. “The first thing I built was an amplifier. I figured if I could do that, I could build a guitar.”

Kansas University professor of scenography Mark Reaney will be a new feature to this year's Art in the Park on Sunday at South Park. Although he doesn't smoke cigars, Reaney has taken it upon himself to craft amplifiers and guitars made from cigar boxes and various other found objects. He is pictured in his Lawrence home on May 3, 2017.

It’s an idea that has occurred to many others through the years.

“There’s a lot of history to cigar box instruments,” Reaney said. “You see pictures of soldiers playing them in the Civil War. They go back further than that. As long as there’s been cigar boxes, people have been making instruments out of them.”

He doesn’t smoke cigars, but secures his cigar boxes online or from local cigar stores, Reaney said. They come in many different sizes. With inspiration from the website cigarboxnation.com, he has crafted instruments from boxes as small as 4-by-5 inches and large as 10-by-14 inches, he said.

“I like the big ones myself, of over a foot long,” he said. “They have a better sound.”

The instruments’ necks have to be crafted, but Reaney insists that’s no big deal.

“Just buy a chunk of wood — a 1-by-2 (inches) — and then hack away at it with a bandsaw or router,” he said. “It’s not as daunting as it seems. Some guys use broomsticks. For the most part since I play with a slide, frets are just drawn on, but I have done six-strings with frets.”

Contributing to the lasting popularity of cigar box instruments is the sound that can be coaxed out of them.

“It sounds very good,” Reaney said. “It has a really tangy sound. I usually play them with a slide, so they have a Delta blues sound to them.”

Most cigar box guitars have three strings, but it’s anything goes, depending on the size of the box, Reaney said. He has made one-string “didley bow” guitars and a six-string instrument from a huge box he found. His cigar box instrument oeuvre includes banjos, ukuleles and kalimbas, or thumb pianos.

“You cut the tines off a rake or something and put them in a cigar box,” he said of the latter instrument. “The trick is getting them in tune.”

Often, cigar box guitars are built with small electronic pickups and meant to be played with an amplifier, Reaney said. He’s made those, and even a wireless model that broadcasts at 100.0 on the FM dial, but he also has a fondness for more traditional ones.

“I think they sound great without the amplifier,” he said. “They are really good for folk music.”

Reaney has embellished his guitars with resonators made from metal cat-food dishes and old brass auto horns.

“That’s a personal touch,” he said of the horn addition. “It’s as much to look at as to play, because, what the heck, you have to make it your own.”

Joining Reaney with booths at South Park will be vendors of ceramics, blown glass, a large number of jewelry, fine artists with paintings and sculpture and more, said Jennifer Unekis, Art in the Park coordinator of the Lawrence Art Guild. The more than 100 vendors committed to this year’s represent the second straight good showing after a few down years.

“We had a rough couple of years,” she said. “People now know Art in the Park is back. We’ve done a better job of marketing it online and benefited from our new online application process.”

In addition to the art booths, there will be an hourly lineup of bands performing throughout the day and food vendors providing food and drink. The Lawrence Arts Center preschool will have children’s activities from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

The art guild has a May 14 rain date reserved, but the forecast is for a mostly sunny day with temperatures in the low 80s, which should entice a good crowd, Unekis said.

That’s what Reaney is hoping for so that he can make a little money to help pay for the postage of sending cigar box instruments to American service personnel in Afghanistan.

“A group of us from Cigar Box Nation send them over there,” he said. “The overseas postal rates are just killing me. Apparently, the instruments are popular over there. They are getting together to form little bands. Unfortunately they don’t post any videos. It would be pretty entertaining seeing Navy SEALs playing cigar box guitars.”