Leo Villareal’s sculpture pays homage to Kansas City’s legacy as The City of Fountains with the programmed illumination of thousands of LEDs. Today, visitors will find more than 200 fountains scattered throughout the metro area. From small and simple to sprawling and majestic, these features can be found in parks, courtyards, and tree-lined boulevards. Forty of these fountains are operated and maintained by the Kansas City Parks and Recreation Department. See below for a guided tour of Kansas City fountains. 

Leo Villareal’s monumental sculpture measures about 24 feet tall and is almost 19 feet wide. Villareal wrote his own program to control the 37,824 LED nodes and evoke the impression of flowing water. Villareal’s website explains that his “... work is focused on stripping systems down to their essence to better understand the underlying structures and rules that govern how they work. He is interested in lowest common denominators such as pixels or the zeros and ones in binary code. Starting at the beginning, using the simplest forms, Villareal begins to build elements within a framework. The work explores not only the physical but adds the dimension of time combining both spatial and temporal resolution.”

The first fountains in Kansas City were purely functional and date back to the late 1800s. These supplied water for work and riding horses as the animals moved through town. Later, the city began building drinking fountains for Downtown citizens. Not long after, the integration of sculpture and monument elevated the pedestrian fountains to art.

George Kessler sparked the push to design fountains in Kansas City with his first fountain at 15th Street and The Paseo in 1898. Kessler was a landscape architect and urban planner during the “City Beautiful” movement. Sadly, this first fountain was destroyed in 1941 but his second fountain, completed in 1899 remains. Located at Ninth Street & The Paseo, The Women’s Leadership Fountain is Kansas City’s oldest working fountain. It bears the names of 13 women who made notable contributions to the community.

In 1973, the City of Fountains Foundation was established by a Hallmark executive and his spouse after the two took a trip to Italy and found many fountains in disrepair. Wanting to restore Kansas City's own collection of fountains, the Foundation was created to build new fountains and manage and maintain existing structures.