This Kansas City artist uses confetti from Super Bowls in Chiefs-inspired works of art

The moment red, yellow and white confetti rained down on the Kansas City Chiefs in 2020 after the team clinched their first Super Bowl Championship in more than 50 years, local artist Megh Knappenberger knew she needed some of the confetti.

“It was a big, big deal,” Knappenberger said. “In that moment when we won in 2020 and that confetti cannon went off, that was just this very iconic, visceral moment of something that was tangible and part of a championship,” she added. “Feeling that moment of excitement was so wonderful,” said Knappenberger, who was watching the game at home with her husband and two children.

Knappenberger, 41, studied graphic design at the University of Kansas and worked as a graphic designer for a dozen years, but she said she has always been a painter. “About six, seven years ago, I decided to throw caution to the wind and become a full time artist,” Knappenberger said. “And I really haven’t looked back since then.”

Knappenberger’s paintings have included a series of paintings on the Kansas Jayhawk, including a set called the Original Six, an iconic collection of six framed, giclée prints of the Kansas Jayhawk. Her work also includes portraits of basketball great Wilt Chamberlain and basketball inventor James Naismith among others. “I have a love of sports and a love of local sports,” said Knappenberger, who is an officially licensed artist for the University of Kansas. “I kind of got my start making work about the Jayhawks and kind of for the Jayhawks,” Knappenberger said.

Working out of a sun-dappled studio in the West Bottoms, Knappenberger, a mixed-media artist, uses acrylic paints as the base for her work and said she adds splatters of paint, or ink and even sometimes a scribble or two from a marker. “I have a tendency to mix kind-of nontraditional, weird things and materials into my work, like confetti,” Knappenberger said.

So when confetti rained down on the Chiefs in 2020, Knappenberger said she wanted a physical way to remember that game. “I reached out on social media and said to my network, “Does anyone know anyone who was at the game?” Knappenberger recalled. That social media post led to a connection with Ryan Toma, a groundskeeper for the Chiefs and who is also the son of legendary groundskeeper George Toma. The younger Toma provided Knappenberger with a garbage bag filled with confetti from Super Bowl LIV in 2020 in Miami Gardens, Florida.

With a work table full of confetti, Knappenberger created LIV-an original painting, a 60x40 piece to commemorate the Chiefs’ Super Bowl LIV Championship and the confetti that Toma collected was incorporated into the painting, giving it texture, detail and a physical reminder of that Chiefs championship. The painting which features the Roman numerals LIV painted in the Chiefs trademark colors sold for $35,000 to a private collector. Knappenberger points out that she also markets her accessible art prints, smaller versions of custom pieces, on her website https://www.meghmakesart.com/homepage with prices that begin at $30.

In between the two Chiefs Super Bowl victories, Knappenberger painted a piece commemorating the Kansas Jayhawks, whose men’s basketball team won the 2022 National Championship.

She also paints portraits of pop culture heroes including Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, music legends Jim Hendrix, Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton.

“So a lot of my work is Midwestern in nature,” said Knappenber, who is originally from St. Louis, but settled in Kansas City, the half-way point between her family and her husband’s. “I’ve painted bison and sunflowers, a lot of which I started to really paint when we moved back to Kansas City after living in Chicago for ten years and just feeling that sense of place and home and putting down roots and wanting to celebrate the things that make Kansas City what it is.”

Last year, Knappenberger painted an iconic image of Ted Lasso, a pro-bono piece she donated to Thundergong, where it was auctioned off for $17,000 to Steps of Faith, a non-profit that provides prosthetic care to amputees. Knappenberger said she continues to donate a portion of the proceeds from the sales of the Ted Lasso painting to the Steps of Faith. Knappenberger believes in giving back and in 2021 she and her husband, Tory, founded The Knappenberger Family Fund, a scholarship fund at KU School of Fine Arts, where the two met, that will help diverse students fund costly art classes.

More confetti? Earlier this year, as the Chiefs prepared for their third Super Bowl in four years, Knappenberger again reached out to Toma, asking about more confetti. “I had this idea to create a shadow box, which I could drop the confetti into that can move around freely as you kind of shake it up, like a snow globe and then it falls and reminds you of that moment when the confetti cannons went off,” said Knappenberger, who created 222 limited edition Confetti shadow boxes with the confetti collected at this years’ Super Bowl LVII Championship in Phoenix.

“You know, that’s the moment that when I think about that night, with being with my family, watching my kids run around, the moment that really sticks in my mind is watching that confetti rain down,” she said. “I wanted a way to freeze that in time and also to have that physical connection back to that moment that we brought home the championship.”