Liberty Memorial's 100th: A light show on the tower

Kansas City's Liberty Memorial is turning 100, and it's marking the occasion by turning its tower into a screen. The National WWI Museum and Memorial has put on 'Liberty's Beacon,' a light, sound, and motion installation that runs over seven weekends, and it's the center piece of the memorial's centenary year.

The setup is built around the memorial's architecture. Three dozen laser projectors cast sharp, colorful, morphing videos onto the tower and the north wall, which runs about 40 feet by 400 feet, with images that play on war and the four civic virtues carved into the stone. Each installation runs 8 to 10 minutes, starts at 7:30 p.m., and repeats every 15 minutes until the last showing at 10:30 p.m. The museum asks people to gather on the North Lawn for the best view.

What changes from week to week is the art. Four acclaimed artists each take a turn interpreting the memorial's inscribed virtues, and none of them are from around here: Xavier de Richemont is a French video artist, Leslie Epsztein and Camille Gross are French projection designers, and Onionlab is a studio based in Barcelona. Each one brings a different visual and auditory experience, with a custom score composed to match. The first three weekends are gone, so the next chance to catch it is Friday, October 16, through Sunday, October 18, when Xavier de Richemont returns. After that, Epsztein and Gross take the 23rd through the 25th, and Onionlab rounds out the 30th through November 1. The final weekend, November 6 to 8, brings all four together, and the whole thing carries through to Veterans Day on Wednesday, November 11, with a special extended run from Monday the 9th.

It helps to know what's actually being lit up. The Liberty Memorial, in Penn Valley Park at 2 Memorial Drive, was dedicated on November 11, 1926, by President Calvin Coolidge in front of more than 150,000 people. It's a neoclassical structure in the Egyptian Revival style, with a central shaft topped by four 40-foot Guardian Spirits carved by Robert Aitken, representing Sacrifice, Honor, Courage, and Patriotism. The Liberty Tower itself stands 217 feet tall, and the whole monument rises 265 feet above the ground.

That tower is now part of the National WWI Museum and Memorial, which opened in 2006 and holds one of the world's largest collections, with more than 350,000 objects. The museum traces the global events from the causes of the war before 1914 through the 1918 armistice and the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. Visitors enter the exhibition space by crossing a glass bridge over a field of 9,000 red poppies, each representing 1,000 combat deaths, for a total of 9 million lives lost. The Main Gallery includes 'Into the Trenches,' the 'Chronology Wall,' and 'Encounters,' which opened on May 23, 2025. The 'Little War' exhibition, which looks at the lives of children during the war, runs through November 11, 2025.

Getting the memorial built was a local effort: in 1919, Kansas City raised more than $2.5 million in just 10 days, which is more than $49 million in today's money. The site closed in 1994 for security reasons and reopened in December 2006 after a restoration and expansion, and it now draws more than a million visitors a year.