Mona Cliff evokes the subtle beauty of Kansas hills and sunsets with millions of tiny beads

The Indigenous artist is among 19 local artists creating work for the new Kansas City airport, scheduled to open next year. For her piece, Cliff has spent months attaching millions of tiny beads to several pieces of raw-edge wood. The final work will be 17 feet long.
Artist Mona Cliff sits on the floor in her home studio in Lawrence, Kansas. Bold patterns of grain stretch across several panels of cherry wood with a rough bark edge. Around the edges she’s built a rippling layer of beeswax, copal resin and pine rosin.

She heats the wax with a small blowtorch to soften it before sticking on strings of tiny beads in bands of warm lavender, ivory and rose.

“I did want to allude to the Kansas landscape, especially the Flint Hills — the way that the hills kind of come together and overlap,” Cliff says. “Sometimes when we have those beautiful, hazy days and you get parts of the hills that are darker or lighter between each other.”