photo by: Courtesy of Mona Cliff

A rendering of a mural designed by Lawrence artist Mona Cliff. The mural, which will be finished spring 2025, will be located at the New Hampshire Street Parking Garage as a way to make the space more welcoming.

Inside the parking garage in the 900 block of New Hampshire Street, there’s nothing to look at right now but a “dark gray space,” in the words of Lawrence’s parking manager. But this spring, a new mural will add a spot of sunshine — and a lot of local pride.

The mural will be painted by local artist Mona Cliff, who has plenty of experience with public art projects in Lawrence and the Kansas City area, and it will fill the wall near the elevator and north stairway of the garage with a stylized sunrise scene. Her design uses orange and gold, deep blue and vivid magenta and teal, and it incorporates several local landmarks — the Campanile, Fraser Hall, the gazebo in South Park and the arch at Haskell Memorial Stadium.

“It’s a way to share my skills with the larger community and also reflect my Native culture in a way where we can see ourselves in the city,” said Cliff, a member of the Gros Ventre tribe and a Haskell Indian Nations University alumna.

Brad Harrell, the parking manager, told the Journal-World that his team had heard concerns about the safety and appearance of the garage and had tried to make it better in recent years. He said that the team had updated the signage in the garage, added cameras and repainted the area for a “small but mighty improvement” there, and that adding the new mural would be like “icing on the cake.”

Harrell said the mural is funded in part by a $5,000 grant that the Douglas County Community Foundation awarded in September. The city will match that $5,000 and add a maximum of $500 on top of that for the costs of preparing the wall for painting. The project now has approval from the Lawrence City Commission and the Lawrence Cultural Arts Commission, and Cliff says it should be finished in March or April depending on the weather.

Cliff said Harrell’s team reached out to her because of her work on another public art project in Lawrence — a design for the side of a city bus shelter. But that’s far from the only place you can see Cliff’s art in Lawrence and the Kansas City area. Her artwork has been featured at the Kansas City International Airport and the Kansas City Museum, and one of her recent works in Lawrence was a mural outside the Social Service League’s thrift store at 905 Rhode Island St.

Harrell called Cliff an “exceptional artist” and said her use of bright colors fits “exactly what (they) want to accomplish.”

The mural could do more than just “emphasize the city’s pride, strength, individuality, uniqueness and diverse culture,” as Harrell put it. It could also discourage graffiti in the garage, which the city would otherwise have to pay to clean up. Harrell said it costs the city around $5,000 annually to remove “crude graffiti” in downtown parking garages.

Harrell also said public art projects like this can benefit businesses in downtown; he cited an article in Forbes about murals in Los Angeles that said that the new murals increased revenue for nearby businesses there by 5% to 10%.

“Anytime we can encourage more visitors to restaurants or retail stores downtown, there’s a huge benefit,” Harrell said.

Harrell said he hopes that this can be a starting point for more public artwork around the parking structures in the city. He said the city was looking to identify two or three other locations that would be good for murals, including some of the alleyways behind the New Hampshire Street parking garage.

“I hope this is a building block for additional art and brightness in the community.” Harrell said.