Wyandot Echoes Mural

The mural is named "Dawning of a New Day" and was created in 2004 by artists Joe Faus and Alisha Gambino. The artwork was sponsored by the Kansas Arts Commission and Bank Midwest. This mural was created to honor the importance of generations, family, and culture in the African American community, with the lefthand side of the mural, emphasizing cultural legacy and the middle features the seven principles of Kwanzaa and shows the hope of children and the future.Finally, there is the righthand side, which mirrors an urban African American skyline."Dawning of a New Day" is located on the north wall of the Frank Williams Outreach Center, a facility providing a number of services to the local homeless community. Its namesake, Frank Williams, worked as a case manager for the Wyandot Center, a local non-profit community mental health center, for four years before suddenly passing away.

Dawning of a New Day Mural - Frank Williams Outreach Center

This mural was completed in 2005 by Jose Faus and Alisha Gambino in combination with a group of local children. Not only was it the kids' idea to paint the mural in the style of a traditional Hmong story cloth, but according to Faus, they also did "95 percent of the work" on the mural. Rather than just do the painting himself, Faus chose to work with the kids directly and support them through the process of planning, design, and painting. When asked to describe the final work, Faus said it was "a simple design, very childish, but it's just great in terms of the themes that it captures.""Facing the Past, Looking to the Future" is a representation of the Hmong people in Kansas City, Kansas, and their relationships with each other, their culture, and their traditions. The border is painted in the style of an embroidered pattern, and the entire mural's dominant colors are green and blue; both of these are common aspects of story cloths. The actions of the people in the mural carry both their surface-level meanings and more metaphorical ones. For example, the children tossing the ball across the river represent two things. The first thing represented is a Hmong cultural practice, a game of catch that can also act as a "courting ritual." In the game, a boy throws the ball to whichever girl he likes, and if she throws it back to him, that means she feels the same way. More metaphorically, it represents Hmong Americans' relationship to their culture - they "toss the ball" between "new" and "old" practices in a sort of balancing act.The Hmong PeopleThe Hmong are a unique Asian people who originated in Central China. Today around three million of them live in Southwest China, as well as neighboring countries like Vietnam and Laos, where communities of Hmong were established as early as the eighteenth century. However, thanks to war and unrest in the mid-to-late twentieth century, many others live in diaspora in countries such as the United States, Europe, and Thailand.The origins of the Hmong people in America traces to the 1970s when the CIA recruited many Hmong men for aid during the Vietnam War. However, when the United States began to withdraw from Vietnam and Laos in 1974, the Hmong people were indiscriminately targeted by Vietnamese communists for helping the Americans and the French before them. With all of them in grave danger of being hunted down and killed, the people began fleeing en masse to Thailand as refugees.Local Laotian Hmong refugee and professor of anthropology, Wayne Yang, was only five years old when he fled Laos in 1979 with his family, but he remembers the experience vividly. Yang described his experience for the Bonner Springs newspaper The Chieftan in 2007:<blockquote>Wayne said his parents woke him up one morning, with smoke in the air, and his parents told him and his siblings they had to hurry because the Vietnamese were coming. They quickly packed together a few belongings and set out through the jungle.</blockquote><blockquote>"My father, right before we left, he threw his gun away, threw it back at the house," Wayne said. "That way the communists couldn't say we were fighting against them."</blockquote><blockquote>Wayne remembers being in the jungle with no food with other Hmong families, making their way to the Thai border on a 16-day trek. ... [and] times when the jungle was bright with fire, as the communists tried to burn the Hmong refugees out. ... [Many] Hmong died of starvation in the jungle.Sarah Yang estimates only a third of her relatives were able to escape the country.</blockquote>After reaching Thailand, many then permanently settled in the United States in cities all around the country. Today about two thousand Hmong people live in Kansas City, Kansas, and the surrounding area.The Hmong Story ClothStorytelling has always been an important part of Hmong culture. The story cloth, a way for them to tell people about their past through colorful and complex embroidered panels, developed in the mid-1970s in refugee camps in Thailand. Not only did these story cloths serve as a way for the refugees, who had lost everything when they left Vietnam and Laos, to make a livelihood for themselves, but they also breached the language barrier, allowing the Hmong people to speak about their past to people all around the world, including Hmong children who had been born and raised elsewhere.

Artists Jose Faus and Alisha Gambino helped area school children design and create this mural, which was completed in 2005 and honors the Hmong community of Kansas. The mural portrays Hmong culture both traditional and modern, using the style of a Hmong embroidered story cloth. The Hmong began arriving in significant numbers from Southwest Asia to American communities such as Kansas City in the 1970s. Today, there are around two thousand Hmong in Kansas City, Kansas. This mural shares some of the unique history and culture of this community, with a focus on how they work, play, form families, and celebrate.

Facing the Past, Looking to the Future: A Kansas Hmong Storycloth

Completed in 2006, this mural was designed by Alicia Gambino, with help from retired workers from the Kansas City Kansan newspaper, and painted by Jose Faus. It depicts a man running a hand press like the kind historically used by newspaper printers.

Kansas Printer Mural

In this 2005 mural by Jose Faus and Alisha Gambino, they explore themes of mortality and religion while displaying colorful folklorico dancers from every region in Mexico. Faus and Gambino tell the regional history of Mexico through the folklorico dancers. The pair of muralists took about two months to complete this work. This mural stands beside the parking lot of a McDonald's in Kansas City, Kansas.

El Baile de la Vida (The Dance of Life) Mural - Vaquero Imports Building

This mural showcases the history of the working-class communities of color such as Latinx and Black residents of Kansas City, Kansas throughout the twentieth century to the present day. At the beginning of the mural, there is a turn of the century white woman in a stagecoach looking out. Next, we see filmmakers and their vision of the area. This is followed by various BIPOC residents of the area enjoying 1920s Kansas City, Kansas. This is quickly followed by hardships- from the world wars, racism, and low-socioeconomic circumstances. There are several BIPOC people involved in the war industry- we see two Black women as Rosie the Riveters. The women are placed above Mexican Americans in zoot suits. Below the Zoot suiters, there are people laboring for the railroad and a shirtless man that appears to be impoverished. Next, we see the flood of 1951 that destroyed and displaced these working-class communities represented here. Finally, there is a person that closely resembles the muralist Jose Faus, as he takes a picture of a diverse group of young people in the community.

This mural was painted by Jose Faus in 2006 who utilizes the metaphor of camera film to represent the passage of time. The figures show a chronology of world events throughout the mid-twentieth century and their effect on various communities of color. Some themes highlighted in Faus' mural include the consequences of discrimination and the tragic consequences of inequality, but there are also images depicting work, family, and community life throughout the work.

Avenue of Murals - Downtown Kansas City, Kansas

Wyandot Echoes Mural

Introduction

Images

Backstory and Context