How to Sculpt a New Civic Image

As the John and Mary Pappajohn Sculpture Garden (PSG) completes its debut season most of its skeptics have gone underground.

Bustling every weekend with camera-laden visitors, the the garden park has become extraordinarily popular with locals and tourists alike. A bright happenstance during an economic recession, the New York Times even proclaimed the PSG a “cure from urban blight.” As its novelty ages and the value of free entertainment depreciates in a hopefully revived economy, now’s a good time to ponder what might be the city’s next move. I posed the following question to some keen observers of Des Moines culture:

“What can be done to capitalize of the Pappajohn’s largess to help Des Moines become known as “a sculpture town” rather than just a town with a downtown sculpture park?

Des Moines Art Center Director Jeff Fleming likes what’s already been done.

“I think that we’re already moving in this direction. The Principal River Walk project has two major sculpture works in progress. The Parks Department has completed one project by creating a sculpture map to downtown and they have another in the works that identifies, with consistent standards of identification, sculptures of note all over the entire metro area. I think the most important thing is to progress with a focus on maintaining an enhancement of quality,” he said.

Journalist Chuck Offenburger also thinks the Parks Department map will lead to more good things.

“First, I’d say a detailed study should be done to identify and locate the most interesting existing sculptures around metro Des Moines. Of course there’s “Crusoe Umbrella.” But we forget some of the intriguing ones – like the tricycle rider in Merle Hay Mall, the tree carvings at the Iowa State Fairgrounds, some of the statues in the Iowa Hall of Pride, the string quartet at Drake, the stylized baseball outside Principal Park, the new Paragon Prairie Tower in the extreme northwest corner of the metro, those at the Art Center, the various military-related statues, some of the best church ones, those on the State Capitol grounds, some great ones in businesses (Mac Hornecker’s in the Iowa Farm Bureau headquarters lobby), and some good ones that might be accessible to the public at private residences.

“That could 1) make it possible to put together a new self-guided “Sculpture Tour” of the city, with occasional escorted tours. 2) It could also identify areas of the city that are really short of sculptures and may stir ideas of what new pieces could go there and 3) If we’re really paying attention to sculpture in Des Moines, that might lead to some new funding sources to commission new pieces – and one of the first ones we should get done is a big one by Sticks, since their headquarters is in Des Moines,” he said.

Sculptor James Ellwanger, who created several of the pieces Offenburger mentioned, agrees that new commissions could stimulate a positive image for the city. He’d like to see it result from a sculpture prize though. Noting that Chicago’s image as America’s greatest architectural city was boosted by the Pritzker Prize, he mused about a competition at the Iowa State Fair.

“They have a million visitors and lots of open space. They already have arts competitions and they’re moving those into a new venue. It would be a great place for sculptors to bring works,” he said.

Author John Domini likes the prize idea and adds that legislation requiring sculpture in new developments has worked imaging miracles in Portland, Oregon and New York City.

“The Portland legislation is called "1% for Art," and it's meant that even the city-center shopping malls Lloyd Center & Pioneer Place have eye-catching, mind-bending sculpture installations at all four entrances. Even parking garages have them, lightening the tomb effect. As for New York, Manhattan has recently grown full of sculpture in public, on block after block, park after park,” he noted.

February 2010

Fire & Rain — the new media?

Photo by Bill Witt

Medium is the message. Marshall MacLuhan’s old mantra is frequently chanted these days as wireless streaming threatens just about every medium that preceded it. While newspaper and newsstand magazine sales dropped more than 9 percent this year, Meredith and Gannett continued a controlled burn of old media jobs. And with brilliant timeliness, “News & Nightmares” reminds us that there’s really nothing new under the sun. The Des Moines Art Center’s new show of wood engravings uses stunning works, by two cutting edge artists from the 19th century, to bracket the history of one short lived medium that enabled all kinds of new forms of art — including recycled art. The medium is examined from the heyday of Winslow Homer’s career as a Civil War magazine illustrator through the moral rot of Max Ernst’s lost generation between the world wars. The show’s Ernst works include an illustrated book called “A Week of Kindness, or the Seven Deadly Elements.”

This surrealist masterpiece is a novel without a plot. “Yet it’s still so compelling it has become a cult thing,” explained curator Amy Worthen, who found a rare copy of the book and persuaded the Art Center to buy it. This long lost medium still moves viewers with an exhibition that investigates the nature and substance of cruelty — from the political and physical cruelties in Homer’s Civil War to the imagined mental cruelties that fascinated the Dadaists and Surrealists of Ernst’s day. Through June 13.

Drake’s Anderson Gallery is hosting a multimedia exhibit in which medium is not only the message, it’s also the subject, the sub text and the subliminal connection to super human ecosystems. “To know the land” is also very fine art.

photo by Bill Witt

Scott Robert Hudson’s piece de resistance is a film about a fire sculpture he built near LaPorte City last autumn — eight-foot tall towers of willow, cedar and river dead fall with bison skulls enclosed. Photographing from several angles, the former U.S. Forest Service firefighter played with the hottest of all media. “Fire creates its own weather; it turns atmospheres inside out. It never behaves the same way twice,” Hudson explained.

Also in this show: Hudson’s “Western Juniper Lava Beds” shows an intricate attention to detail rarely seen in watercolors anywhere; Painted sculptures of 20 bison skulls, plus a shadow dancing,

hanging sculpture of a painted horse’s head all pay homage to the war paints of the Iowa Indian chief White Cloud, as depicted by George Catlin;

A sculpture of shot gun shells, Acoma pottery shards and beaver skulls reflect on the nature of war; Wood carvings and bobcat brush drawings reveal an artist tuned in to both the media and methods of ancient artisans working the same territory. Through Feb. 28.

At the Des Moines Botanical Center, photojournalist John Gaps III uses his medium to examine the nature of water. Abstractions from his lens play with H2O droplets in various stages of evaporation where each gaseous bubble reflects full prism globes. Different shots catch flood water on asphalt, water on windshields, floating lilies, melting ice on sheet metal, boat fuel frozen under early river ice, crepuscular light reflected off flood water, and a hail damaged pickup truck simulating Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” Through March 31.

Des Moines writer John Domini has long been paying dues in myriad forms of the literary medium. Now he’s collecting some residuals. Last year Domini won a Major Artist Grant from Iowa Arts Council and the runner-up prize for Italy’s Domenico Rea Award, for his novel “Earthquake I.D.” Last month his new novel “Tomb on the Periphery” was selected one of the top nine international books by the London Book Festival in England. “Tomb” was then contracted for translation, a Domini short story was included in the prestigious anthology “Paraspheres 2,” one of his essays in the anthology “Papa Ph.D.,” and two of his poems for “Poetic Voices without Borders,” which will be published next month.