DINKC’s We Are Home is installed at the North Loop Southbound KC Streetcar Shelter.
2026 Art in the Loop enlivens the Streetcar route with works by 11 artists who explore what home is and what it means to people
However you define it, reflect on it, long for it or just appreciate it, home is where the art is in the 2026 Art in the Loop.
The 13th annual alfresco art exhibit and accompanying performance art series are driven by the distinct artwork of 11 Kansas City area artists tasked with sharing their visual interpretations of this year’s theme: “Home.”
The artworks, selected by the Art in the Loop Foundation from more than 135 entries, will remain on public display through November at or near Kansas City Streetcar shelters along the 6.5-mile streetcar loop, from the University of Missouri-Kansas City to the new Riverfront Extension.
Tourism from this summer’s World Cup soccer matches in Kansas City could also bring more streetcar riders and attention to Art in the Loop. All the better to show what we hold dear here through unity and diversity, says Art in the Loop visual art director Khyneesha Edwards.
“With the World Cup being here in town and given the current climate around what home is and what it means to people — how important it is and how that evolves every day — we thought that it would be an appropriate and very fitting theme for our city to reflect upon,” Edwards says. “And, while this is our home, the people that make up this home all have a different interpretation of what home means to them. We wanted to marry that appreciation and celebration of cultures to Kansas City.
“Not only is it important that we can connect with artwork, but when we can look at artwork and see the humanity in others and become curious about others and their experiences and their cultures and backgrounds and their day-to-day, that just shows how art can be so powerful in moving us closer together.”
BARBECUE IN BLACK-AND-WHITE
Photographer Deanna Dikeman’s international reputation for finding meaningful moments in ordinary human behavior is most notably demonstrated in “Leaving and Waving,” her collection of 27 photos over 27 years of her Iowan parents waving goodbye to her as she left to return home to Kansas City.
In her Art in the Loop contribution, Patio Barbecues, Dikeman presents another chronologically tender treatment of family in a series of four black-and-white photos from 1996, 1998, 2004 and 2008. To say the images are sweet is to not say enough about them. Yet they indeed nurture a warm gaze, along with a sense of timelessness despite the clear passage of time.
“There’s my Mom and my Dad and then there’s just my Dad and the barbecue,” Dikeman says, breaking down the quartet of images. “And my son comes in and my Dad’s starting the grill with this charcoal lighter fluid, and there’s flames, which you’re never supposed to do, and he’s got my son standing in the garage — like, ‘stand back, I’m going to do this’ — and then the last picture is where he’s kind of overseeing my son and showing him how he’s going to stack these coals on the grill.
“So it’s a little sequence through time of the same patio, the same grill and what went on in their backyard. And my Dad never barbecued, except when I showed up. For some reason, when I was there, it was like the excuse to put some steaks or some chicken on the grill. Nobody makes little grills like that anymore, do they, on this little tripod? I have it in my garage.”
This is Dikeman’s first time exhibiting in Art in the Loop, as well as the first time she applied to participate. She couldn’t resist.
“I thought, oh, yeah, this is right up my alley — home,” she recalls. “So I started looking at my pictures and thinking about what I could put together. And this is a barbecue town. Barbecue is serious here.”
Want serious? Take Dikeman’s persistent sense of artistic wonder and her overarching faith in the human experience.
“What I see when I look at other art is, ‘Oh, my, gosh. I never thought that could be art . . .” she says. “I like to look at things and open my mind to possibilities. So maybe people will look and say, ‘Gosh, I never thought a barbecue in my parents’ backyard could be art.’ I just hope people ride by on the streetcar and smile. If this gives somebody a smile or makes them appreciate their dad or their grandpa or some little thing they did, that’ll be wonderful.”
FOLLOW THE SWALLOWS
In 2023, multidisciplinary artist Ramona Cliff, a transplant from the Pacific Northwest who lives in Lawrence, was painting a mural with one of her daughters by the Shunga Creek in Topeka.
“We were sitting there, just taking a break, and all these little barn swallows were dipping and swooping and diving and flying over the creek,” Cliff remembers. “I knew they were just catching insects for their breakfast, but the creek was glistening and it was just this perfect moment. Even though we were right by the road, we were witnessing nature just kind of being itself. It was magical.”
It was also the moment that inspired Cliff’s Evening Flights, her digital drawing of barn swallows soaring amid an urban landscape that covers the exterior of a Kansas City streetcar in this year’s Art in the Loop. The vibrant image also incorporates buffalo design and sunset elements, melding her Native American tradition with the modern world.
“The whole scene, put together for me, is calling the prairie home,” Cliff says. “It’s making it my home and making it somewhere where we’re having these experiences, because there are opportunities to appreciate where I’m at and to learn to love where I’m at. It’s just the moments that we have with our families, no matter where you are, that makes it feel like home.”
Cliff’s view of home may indeed comprise a practical maneuver of the mind, but it’s also an organic and even ancient understanding of the different possibilities of home, wherever it may be found to provide solace and the strength to move ahead.
“Honestly, we share the Earth and our environment,” she says. “And even though we’re all separated in our homes, everyone has to take steps on the Earth to move forward. And there may be differences. There may be people who aren’t as close to nature as other people, but maybe my artwork will make them stop and appreciate that more. Maybe they will pause to look beyond the city.”
SUGAR SKULL STORY
Kansas City cartoonist, tagger/graffiti artist and mural maker Laedan Galicia — popularly known as DINKC (pronounced “dink” with a silent “c”) — returns to Art in the Loop this year with We Are Home. The colorful mural depicts his alter-ego sugar skull character holding a can of spray paint in one hand and in the other a cluster of heart-shaped balloons that appear to be carrying him away.
“I wanted the image, first and foremost, to just grab your attention,” DINKC says. “You see it and you’re like, ‘Oh, whoa, he’s floating away.’ But I imagine that he’s floating and kind of holding on, because the streetcar just passed him and blew him around a little bit — that’s the movement that you see. So it’s interactive and a fun little thing that I want the little kids to have a laugh at. But I also want people to dive deeper into it. That’s what art is and you should be able to tell a story.”
We Are Home speaks to the current immigrant situation in the United States, DINKC says.
“A lot of people are using hate speech or saying stuff like, ‘Hey, go back to your home,’” he says. “And I just want to show that we are home. We’ve been home. Home is what you make of it. It’s wherever you land, in a way. We get floated away as immigrants and, wherever we land, that’s where we make home and that’s where we make better opportunities.”
Visually influenced by such old-style cartoon characters as Mickey Mouse and Felix the Cat, as well as classically wordless “Spy vs. Spy” shenanigans from MAD magazine, DINKC looks to his art being taken in by many fresh eyes during Art in the Loop.
“All sorts of walks of life are going to be able to join us here during the World Cup and experience Kansas City,” he says. “But it’s also a chance to showcase my artwork to a bunch of different new viewers from outside Kansas City, outside of the United States. I just want to connect with people and resonate some way, somehow through my artwork and also be able to network and see maybe what comes from this.”
DINKC’s name stands for “Death Is Not Knowing Certainty,” which is “kind of an oxymoron,” he concedes, “because death is the only certain thing we have in life, but we just never know when, where, how or why. I like to push that out as much as I can, just to remind people to live every day like it’s your last — and why not do something you absolutely love?
“Love is always more powerful than hate. Spread that and spread art and spread good vibes and just create this home together, because we’re all here and we might as well all enjoy it as much as we can.”
For more information about Art in the Loop, including specific locations of artworks and a full schedule of events, go to artintheloop.com.
