The KCAI Brush Creek Community Rain garden was formally unveiled yesterday with a ceremony in Theis Park. The work of artist Julia Coles, students in the Kansas City Art Institute's (KCAI) Persuasive Ecology Design Class, the KCAI Community Service Arts Service Learning program, Brush Creek Community Partners, Discovery Center, and a host of other agencies and interested citizens, the rain garden was over a year in the making. If that seems like a long time to build a rain garden, it shouldn't seem like a long time to build a community. Building a community takes work - lots of it - and this project is an example of how artists bring a new and different kind of energy and vision to projects. One that reaches into communities with far-reaching and lasting implications.
At the core of this rain garden project, deeper than the roots of the native plants used to build it, was education, community involvement, and listening. Students worked for a semester on designing a public art project and to do that, they invited members of the community into the classroom to discuss ideas about various components of the project. This included naturalists, landscape architects, scientists, engineers, business leaders, and politicians. They listened to the community; the community listened to them. Then students, with guidance from Julia and her colleague Tyler Galloway, designed the layout of the rain garden, its intent and purpose, and vetted that again with the community. The result is one of the largest and most visible rain gardens of the Kansas Citiy 10,000 program. And one of the most interesting, if not the most important.
The result is a garden like no other in the city. Some of the components that set this garden apart are "learning stones." These are several kind of learning stones in and around the garden. Some are ceramic stones, about the size of a cobble, embedded within the garden. Visitors can take these stones out into the community and drop them like pebbles, with the idea that these can act to further the ideas behind the project. Additionally, there are larger cast stones designed to educate the public about some of the water-quality issues related to the 10,000 rain garden project - such as how capturing and infiltrating stormwater runoff into rain gardens reduces the amount of runoff that might otherwise end up going through more traditional catch basins, which provide little, if any, water-quality benefits.Photos, Top to bottom, from upper left.
*Detail of Brush Creek Community Rain Garden.
*Artist Julia Coles, Former Kansas City Mayor Kay Barnes, Kansas City Councilwoman Jan Marcussson, and John Fierro, President of the Parks Board.
*Informational stone.
*Traditional concrete catch basin being installed at 18th and Tracy.
elsewhere:
kcai raingarden
discovery center
10,000 raingardens