By Ron Wilson, director of the Huck Boyd National Institute for Rural Development at Kansas State University
There’s a fever which has begun in a Kansas community. Don’t worry, this is a good kind of fever. It is what one artist described as “mural fever,” where a community put up a mural and that led to another mural and then another. These murals have improved the downtown appearance and sparked new interest in the community.
Brett Hubka is community bank president in Clay Center, president of the Clay Center Rotary Club, and the person who launched the initial idea for a mural in his community. Brett has rural roots, having grown up in Medicine Lodge. His mother is from the rural community of Sharon, population 158 people. Now, that’s rural.
Brett attended Kansas State University, where he met his future wife who is from Oberlin. They married and moved to Oklahoma where she attended optometry school. She joined a practice in Clay Center where Brett came to work in the bank. “Rural Kansas is important to us,” Brett said. “This is where we want to raise our kids.” Brett’s parents, Mike and Elene Hubka, are educators who now live in Manhattan. Continue reading “Brett Hubka, A Mural Movement”
