Wichita
— the wheat-light the prairie keeps after sundown.
Not only on a wall.
“Wichita sits where the Little Arkansas joins the Arkansas River, in the middle of the country and the middle of Kansas. The largest city in the state by population, it grew on the cattle trail and on aviation. Boeing, Beechcraft, Cessna, and Stearman all built airplanes here in the 1930s and 1940s. The downtown Keeper of the Plains, a 13-metre Corten steel sculpture by Blackbear Bosin, stands at the river junction with two fire bowls.
Wichita, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Wichita is the largest city in Kansas, with a population of about 397,000 inside the city limits and 650,000 in the metropolitan area. It lies in Sedgwick County in south-central Kansas at an elevation of 396 metres, on the Great Plains roughly halfway between Kansas City and Oklahoma City. The Arkansas River and the Little Arkansas meet at the western edge of downtown. The city was incorporated in 1870 on land that had been a Wichita and Affiliated Tribes trading settlement; the name carries from the people who lived here first.
South-central Kansas sits inside Tornado Alley, and the air is a working part of the city: warm Gulf moisture climbs north each spring and meets dry continental wind off the Rockies, producing the storms that built the National Weather Service's severe-weather forecast methods. Summer afternoons reach 35°C and carry the smell of cut wheat from the fields outside the loop. By late afternoon in July a wall of cumulus often stands along the western horizon; the prairie behind it holds the long evening light Kansans call wheat-light.
The Keeper of the Plains sits at the river confluence on land sacred to the Wichita people; the fire bowls at its base are lit nightly at 9 PM in summer and 7 PM in winter. The Old Town district holds the Museum of World Treasures and the Kansas Aviation Museum, the latter in the Art Deco hangar that once served as Wichita's first airport. Botanica, the city's botanical garden, runs 18 acres along the river. Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport handles all commercial traffic in and out.