photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World
Parking manager Brad Harrell stands by the mural by Mona Cliff in the New Hampshire Street parking garage on Friday, April 10, 2026.
As Lawrence’s parking manager, Brad Harrell is well aware that parking garages have an image problem.
“Parking garages are dark and intimidating by nature,” Harrell says in his brightly lit office in the New Hampshire Street garage. They’re associated with crime and graffiti, and you’d not exactly take a photo of one and put it on social media.
So, when he sees people doing just that in the New Hampshire garage – next to the vibrant mural that local artist Mona Cliff painted for it last year – he can’t help but feel proud of it.
“So many people comment on it,” Harrell said. People have had their pictures taken in front of it; downtown businesses have said it’s made a positive impact.
“We’ve seen just a tremendous amount of success with it.”
Even more art is coming soon to Lawrence’s downtown parking garages. There’s a mural going up in the Vermont Street garage by Tokeya Waci U Richardson, and soon the New Hampshire Street garage will have paintings of Kansas flora and fauna mounted above its spaces to help people remember where they parked. And Harrell wants to keep giving artists opportunities to collaborate and display their work.
Harrell sees art in parking garages as an investment, because studies have shown that public art deters graffiti. The city spends about $5,000 each year to remove crude graffiti from its parking structures, he said, and since Cliff’s mural was painted, “we’ve already seen a pretty drastic reduction in that.”
Hang12, the group of high school artists behind the nature-themed parking markers, has the same idea. When the markers were presented to the Lawrence Cultural Arts Commission this past week, Lawrence High sophomore Thurston Saint Onge said that was one of the things he liked about doing the project.
“There’s been statistics that say there’s less crime in areas with public art, which is really cool, and we want to encourage that,” Saint Onge said.
photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World
Parking manager Brad Harrell looks through a stack of markers created by the student art group Hang12 on Friday, April 10, 2026.
In the parking office, Harrell sorts through stacks of Hang12’s markers, painted in colorful acrylics on plywood. The young artists told the Cultural Arts Commission they worked hard, mixing the colors themselves, cutting the shapes, taking the pieces home to do extra work on them.
There are 32 of them, each depicting a different animal or plant – a box turtle, a salamander with bright yellow spots, a fuzzy bee, a sunflower.
“They look so good!” Harrell says.
They’re also a good example of how the parking department handles its art projects – let the artists lead the way, and help them with the red tape, funding and government approvals.
The Hang12 artists, he said, approached the city when they were applying for a grant. They needed a letter of support, which the department was glad to provide.
Then, Harrell got out of the way and let them create.
“They said ‘parking markers,’ and we said, ‘great.’ And they said ‘Kansas-themed,’ and we said, ‘That sounds amazing.’ And then really, next thing you know is, ‘Hey, here’s some of our mockups,’ and, you know, ‘Wow, this is great, more than we ever dreamed of.’”
“And that’s been my experience when dealing with some of our local artists,” Harrell continued. “They say, ‘Here’s my concept,’ most of the time I’m going, ‘Wow, I don’t know if this could be any better than what you dreamed up.’”
The markers still need a final approval from the City Commission before they can go up, but Harrell expects that within a couple of weeks.
photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World
Parking markers created by the student arts group Hang12 are pictured on Friday, April 10, 2026.
photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World
Parking markers created by the student arts group Hang12 are pictured on Friday, April 10, 2026.
With Cliff’s mural, which was partly funded with a Douglas County Community Foundation grant, Harrell said there wasn’t much input from his department other than the idea of a “Welcome to Lawrence” mural and a couple of very broad requests.
“We said we want it bright, we want it clean, we want it inviting, and after that we really let the artist and their personality and their approach to art ring true. We’re not going to try to step in and add anything like that,” he said.
Where he can help is identifying a space that would be improved with a piece of art, and sometimes with funding the pieces.
That’s how the Vermont Street garage’s mural project came about. The mural will cost $5,000, which will come out of the parking fund – that means it’s funded just by parking fees and fines, not by tax money. The city opened applications for an artist to paint a design on a specific section of the wall, and in February the Cultural Arts Commission chose which of the artists’ proposals to use.
“Everything has a process,” Harrell said, “and I’m a very, very small part of that process.”
photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World
A mural by Tokeya Waci U Richardson underway at the Vermont Street parking garage on Friday, April 10, 2026.
There are other spaces that Harrell is interested in beautifying, too – not surprising, because “these parking facilities, what they have in abundance is very large, blank, gray walls.”
He mentioned the alley behind the New Hampshire Street garage, which is a pedestrian walkway, as a potential site for art. There’s also the Riverfront garage, which will be the only city garage without a mural. Right now, it’s not as heavily used as the other two, but the parking staff is doing some repainting work and cleaning up its stair towers.
“We are investing in that, and I think that as we’ve seen growth, especially in the last year here in that general area, there’s going to be some great opportunities for us to continue to invest in that facility, potentially brighten, clean up, the same that we’re doing with our others,” Harrell said.
Later this month, Harrell and the Lawrence Arts Center will be celebrating the public art projects in the New Hampshire Street garage and unveiling the new markers at a ribbon-cutting. It starts at 4:45 p.m. April 28 at the Arts Center, across the street from the garage, and guests can meet the youth artists and hear remarks from Cliff, as well.
And if you’re an artist interested in doing a project, Harrell said the parking department would be happy to hear from you. He said artists can contact his office by email at parking@lawrenceks.gov.
“The possibilities are really endless when you look at it,” he said. “As soon as you get one mural in there, your tendency is to go, ‘Wow, where could we put more?’”
photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World
Parking markers created by the student arts group Hang12 are pictured on Friday, April 10, 2026.
