Strawberry Hill's Art Walk Just Ran Its First Kids' Show, and the Season Has One Friday Left

Earlier this month, Strawberry Hill's Third Friday Art Walk did something it has never done before: it ran a juried art show built entirely around Kansas City, Kansas, Public Schools students, with adults stepping back into the roles of judges and gift-card sponsors instead of the main event. The walk itself keeps its usual six-month rhythm, May through October, and the season now has exactly one Friday left before it goes quiet until spring. Those two facts don't line up the way you might expect. The youth show already happened. The season's actual last night is still ahead, and there's no confirmation yet that the kids' exhibit comes back for it.

That's worth sitting with for a second. A monthly street party that's spent years turning storefronts into pop-up galleries for local painters and potters just handed part of one Friday night to more than 30 kids working in clay, watercolor, graphite, and glitter, and organizers are already talking about doing it again.

Six Fridays, Then a Pause

The mechanics of the walk are simple and unchanged. It happens the third Friday of the month, May through October, 5 to 9 p.m., centered on 6th Street in downtown Kansas City, Kansas. It's free. A digital map goes up a few days before each walk showing which storefronts are hosting art, music, or specials that night. The event is a program of Community Housing of Wyandotte County, backed by the Downtown Shareholders of Kansas City, KS, the Strawberry Hill Neighborhood Association, the Merc Co+op, and EPIC Arts, among other local partners.

Scale gives some sense of what six months of this actually adds up to. Over the 2025 season, organizers reported more than 50 local artists participating, over 140 submissions to the walk's art competitions, and more than 1,000 attendees moving through 10-plus Strawberry Hill businesses that hosted pop-ups and specials across the run. That's the baseline this season has been building on, and it's a useful number to hold onto, because the youth show wasn't part of it. It's new.

What EPIC Built Before the Vote Even Opened

The youth show came out of EPIC Arts, the clay studio that anchors the walk's Street Gallery each month, working with Build WyCo. More than 30 students from Kansas City, Kansas, Public Schools submitted work in clay, watercolor, graphite, and glitter, much of it built around what reminds each kid of home. That prompt matters in a neighborhood built by generations of people who left one home for another.

The judging ran in two stages. First, EPIC staff and students from the Kansas City Art Institute narrowed the submissions, selecting finalists by age group. Those school-level picks received cash prizes. Then the walk itself became the second stage: anyone at that Third Friday could vote in person, and the public's chosen winners took home gift cards to Blick Art Materials. Caroline Meek, EPIC's outreach coordinator, put the show together working directly with area art teachers and the school district's integrated arts resource center. In the weeks leading up to it, EPIC ran workshops with the Bethel Neighborhood Center and the Armourdale Renewal Association, part of a broader effort to get more kids and families into a working studio before they ever had to hang anything on a wall.

Organizers have said they intend to make the youth show a recurring part of future seasons, not a one-off. That framing changes what the walk is, at least a little. It's not just a monthly circuit for adult artists and restaurants. For one night, it also became a place where a fifth grader's glitter piece got a real public vote, the same evening grown-ups were wandering into wine bars two doors down.

The youth show ran alongside Build WyCo's regular block party on 6th Street near EPIC's studio: live music, dancing, interactive art stations, and vendor tables. EPIC itself offered a free clay activity for anyone who wanted to try it, a tile-decorating project tied to a larger community collaborative piece, and open time on a pottery wheel, along with pottery made by local artists for sale.

Two Addresses for One Building

Here's a small, useful piece of local knowledge if you're trying to find EPIC's studio on a map before you go. The Kansas City Star has listed the address as 611 N. 6th Street. A separate online event listing gives it as 609 N. 6th Street. Both numbers point to roughly the same stretch of block, and in practice it doesn't matter much, because on Art Walk nights that section of 6th Street is closed to cars anyway and turned into the pedestrian-only Street Gallery. You don't need the exact house number. You need to park, walk toward the closed street, and follow the tables.

EPIC Clay Studio is where the Street Gallery begins each month, so it makes a reliable meeting point. If a map app drops your pin a door or two off, the closed block and the vendor tables will show you where the walk starts.

Where You Park Tells You Where to Start

Free parking on Art Walk nights comes down to three spots: the Unified Government's lot at 6th and Barnett, the Merc Co+op, and Splitlog Coffee Co. Each of those doubles as a landmark worth knowing on its own, not just a place to leave your car.

Splitlog Coffee Co. is the one with the view. Its rooftop patio looks out over the downtown Kansas City skyline, and the coffee shop's exterior carries the Splitlog Mural, painted by local artist Gregory Kolsto as a tribute to Matthias Splitlog, the early landowner the neighborhood was originally named after before it became Strawberry Hill. Parking there before an Art Walk means you're starting your night already looking at one of the pieces of public art the neighborhood is known for.

The Storefronts That Become Galleries for One Night

Third Friday works because Strawberry Hill's regular businesses agree to double as exhibit space for a few hours, and the mix is specific enough that it's worth naming rather than describing in general terms.

Krizman's Sausage has been a neighborhood fixture since the 1930s, founded by Croatian immigrant Joseph Krizman and now run by his grandson, Joseph Krizman III, still selling the same sausage and smoked meat recipes. Flagship Books is the neighborhood's independent bookstore on 6th Street, the kind of shop that stays part of the walk's route every month regardless of theme. Beverly's, one of the newer additions to the neighborhood's restaurant lineup, is known for pizza and a shareable mashup of charcuterie and nachos locals have taken to calling "charcachos." The Blue Palm is a tiki lounge with one of the better patio views of the skyline in the neighborhood, a good stop if you want a rum cocktail after the Art Walk winds down. Fat Matt's Vortex, a cash-only dive bar with a mural by local artist DINKC on its brick exterior, is the kind of place regulars will tell you not to skip even though it doesn't look like a gallery from the sidewalk. Mockingbird Lounge rounds it out with its own skyline-view patio and a spot on the neighborhood's informal taco circuit.

None of these businesses needed the Art Walk to exist. What the walk does is put them all on the same night, on the same closed-off block, so a resident who already knows Krizman's for lunch or Fat Matt's for a cheap beer gets a reason to see them lit up with someone else's paintings on the wall for one evening a month.

One Friday Left

The season's actual closing night falls on the third Friday of October. After that, no walk again until May, the same pause Strawberry Hill regulars have learned to expect the way you'd expect a farmers market to close for winter. There's no confirmation yet that the youth show returns for that final Friday this year. What organizers have said is that they want it back as an annual piece of the walk, which points more toward next spring's season opener than a repeat performance in the next few weeks.

Either way, the walk closing out this season is the same one that, just a few weeks ago, handed part of a Friday night to more than 30 kids making art about what home looks like to them, in a neighborhood built by people who crossed an ocean to start over. That's not a small thing for a monthly street party to have done, whether or not it shows up again before the calendar turns to November.

If you're the kind of Strawberry Hill resident who already has Third Friday on the calendar, the October walk is the one to catch before the pause sets in. And if you're the kind of person who reads a post like this because you're still getting to know Kansas City, Kansas, from the outside, that's exactly the kind of street-level detail we spend our time tracking at The Sigman Team. We work in neighborhoods across Johnson County and both Kansas Cities, and knowing what's happening on 6th Street this fall is part of knowing the market. Reach out any time you want a local read on a neighborhood before you commit to anything.