The John and Mary Pappajohn Sculpture Park is a park within

Western Gateway Park Western Gateway Park is an urban park located in downtown Des Moines, Iowa. Opened in 2006, the park has served as the host to political rallies, the Des Moines Arts Festival, the 80/35 Music Festival, and various athletic events and festival ...

Des Moines Des Moines () is the capital and the most populous city in the U.S. state of Iowa. It is also the county seat of Polk County. A small part of the city extends into Warren County. It was incorporated on September 22, 1851, as Fort Des Moines, ...

, Iowa. It opened in 2009 with 24 sculptures, with four more acquired later. The sculpture park is administered by the

Des Moines Art Center The Des Moines Art Center is an art museum with an extensive collection of paintings, sculpture, modern art and mixed media. It was established in 1948 in Des Moines, Iowa. History The Art Center traces its roots to 1916, when the Des Moines As ...

and contains works by artists such as

Louise Bourgeois Louise Joséphine Bourgeois (; 25 December 191131 May 2010) was a French-American artist. Although she is best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation art, Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and printmaker. She explored a varie ...

Jaume Plensa Jaume Plensa i Suñé (; born 23 August 1955) is a Spanish visual artist, sculptor, designer and engraver. He is a versatile artist who has also created opera sets, video projections and acoustic installations. He worked with renowned Catalan th ...

Ai Weiwei Ai Weiwei (, ; born 28 August 1957) is a Chinese contemporary artist, documentarian, and activist. Ai grew up in the far northwest of China, where he lived under harsh conditions due to his father's exile. As an activist, he has been openly c ...

, and

Barry Flanagan Barry Flanagan OBE RA (11 January 1941 – 31 August 2009) was an Irish-Welsh sculptor. He is best known for his bronze statues of hares and other animals. Biography Barry Flanagan was born on 11 January 1941 in Prestatyn, North Wales. ...

. It is considered "one of the most significant collections of outdoor sculptures in the United States".

History

The park is named for John Pappajohn, a local venture capitalist and his wife Mary Louise Pappajohn (1933-2022), who gifted the initial 24 sculptures, with a valuation of about $40 million USD, to the city of Des Moines. The couple are recognized art collectors, appearing in the

ARTnews ''ARTnews'' is an American visual-arts magazine, based in New York City. It covers art from ancient to contemporary times. ARTnews is the oldest and most widely distributed art magazine in the world. It has a readership of 180,000 in 124 countri ...

list of top 200 art collectors from 1998 to 2014. The first sculptures donated for the park were originally part of the Pappajohn's private collection, and located in their yard. Before they were moved to Western Gateway Park, people used to drive by their home to look at the art.

Diana Agrest Diana I. Agrest (born 1945) is a practicing architect and urban designer and an architecture and urban design theorist, in New York City. From the beginning of her career, while still a student, she started developing critical work on urban disc ...

and Mario Gandelsonas, two New York based architects, designed the landscape with grassy mounds and parabolic-shaped cutaways. These cutouts create walled-in spaces used to display the sculptures in groups of related artistic styles. The Pappajohn sculpture park was the capstone of the broad redevelopment project that revitalized

downtown Des Moines Downtown Des Moines is the central business district of Des Moines, Iowa and the Greater Des Moines Metropolitan Area. Downtown Des Moines is defined by the City of Des Moines as located between the Des Moines River to the east, the Raccoon Rive ...

. In the early 2000s, the west end of downtown Des Moines was in a dilapidated state, with auto repair shops, seedy businesses, and worn out and vacant buildings. The city decided to remediate the situation and created Western Gateway park from 10th to 15th street, demolishing derelict buildings and moving an historic apartment complex to another site. Development of Western Gateway and the addition of the sculpture park enhanced the real estate value and drove new investments to the area. At its inauguration in 2009, the sculpture park was an optimistic counterpoint to the

Great Recession The Great Recession was a period of marked general decline, i.e. a recession, observed in national economies globally that occurred from late 2007 into 2009. The scale and timing of the recession varied from country to country (see map). At ...

, and to the destruction across Iowa caused by floods and tornadoes the previous year. In 2011, ''White ghost'' by

Yoshitomo Nara is a Japanese artist. He lives and works in Nasushiobara, Tochigi Prefecture, though his artwork has been exhibited worldwide. Nara has had nearly 40 solo exhibitions since 1984. His art work has been housed at the MoMA and the Los Angeles Coun ...

was installed in the park, after being exhibited in New York, as public art placed near the entrances to the

Asia Society The Asia Society is a non-profit organization that focuses on educating the world about Asia. It has several centers in the United States (Manhattan, Washington, D.C., Houston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco) and around the world (Hong Kong, Man ...

and the

Park Avenue Armory __NOTOC__ The Park Avenue Armory Conservancy, generally known as Park Avenue Armory, is a nonprofit cultural institution within the historic Seventh Regiment Armory building located at 643 Park Avenue on New York City's Upper East Side. The inst ...

. The Des Moines Art Center was the 2017 recipient of the Art Conservation Project grant from

Bank of America The Bank of America Corporation (often abbreviated BofA or BoA) is an American multinational investment bank and financial services holding company headquartered at the Bank of America Corporate Center in Charlotte, North Carolina. The bank w ...

, given for the restoration of

Keith Haring Keith Allen Haring (May 4, 1958 – February 16, 1990) was an American artist whose pop art emerged from the New York City graffiti subculture of the 1980s. His animated imagery has "become a widely recognized visual language". Much of his wor ...

's ''Untitled (Three Dancing Figures, version C)''. The sculpture was structurally sound, but the paint coating had deteriorated from years of outdoor public display. In 2018, ''Pumpkin Large'' by Japanese artist

Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese contemporary artist who works primarily in sculpture and installation, and is also active in painting, performance, video art, fashion, poetry, fiction, and other arts. Her work is based in conceptual art and shows some attributes ...

was installed in the park. The bronze pumpkin is about 8 feet high, including a 3-foot pedestal. The surface has a pattern of recessed dots of different sizes, going all the way up to the stem. According to Jeff Fleming, director of the Des Moines Art Center, the piece is a “definitive work by one of the most important contemporary artists working today”. A version of

Robert Indiana Robert Indiana (born Robert Clark; September 13, 1928 – May 19, 2018) was an American artist associated with the pop art movement. His iconic image LOVE was first created in 1964 in the form of a card which he sent to several friends and acq ...

's iconic ''LOVE'' sculpture was placed in the park in 2019.

Sculptures

List of artwork

Currently there are 28 sculptures in the park: *''Reclining figure'' (1982) by

Willem de Kooning Willem de Kooning (; ; April 24, 1904 – March 19, 1997) was a Dutch-American abstract expressionist artist. He was born in Rotterdam and moved to the United States in 1926, becoming an American citizen in 1962. In 1943, he married painter El ...

*''Gymnast III'' (1985) by

William G. Tucker William G. Tucker (born 28 February 1935) is a modernist British sculptor and modern art scholar. Biography Tucker was born to English parents on 28 February 1935 in Cairo, Egypt. In 1937, his family returned to England, where Tucker was rais ...

*''Untitled'' (1985) by

Joel Shapiro Joel Shapiro (born September 27, 1941 New York City, New York) is an American sculptor renowned for his dynamic work composed of simple rectangular shapes. The artist is classified as a Minimalist as demonstrated in his works, which were mostly ...

*''In the morning'' (1986) by

Anthony Caro Sir Anthony Alfred Caro (8 March 192423 October 2013) was an English abstract sculptor whose work is characterised by assemblages of metal using ' found' industrial objects. His style was of the modernist school, having worked with Henry Moor ...

*''Five plate pentagon'' (1986) by

Richard Serra Richard Serra (born November 2, 1938) is an American artist known for his large-scale sculptures made for site-specific landscape, urban, and architectural settings. Serra's sculptures are notable for their material quality and exploration o ...

*''T8'' (1987) by

Mark Di Suvero Marco Polo di Suvero (born September 18, 1933, in Shanghai, China), better known as Mark di Suvero, is an abstract expressionist sculptor and 2010 National Medal of Arts recipient. Biography Early life and education Marco Polo di Suvero was bor ...

*''Juno'' (1989) and ''Ancient Forest'' (2009) by

Deborah Butterfield Deborah Kay Butterfield (born May 7, 1949) is an American sculptor. Along with her artist-husband John Buck, she divides her time between a farm in Bozeman, Montana, and studio space in Hawaii. She is known for her sculptures of horses made fr ...

*''Marriage'' (1989) by Tony Smith *''Order'' (1989) by

Tony Cragg Sir Anthony Douglas Cragg (born Liverpool 9 April 1949) is an Anglo-German sculptor, resident in Wuppertal, Germany since 1977. Early life and training Tony Cragg was born in Liverpool."Tony Cragg." ''Contemporary Artists''. Farmington Hills, ...

*''Decoy'' (1990) by Martin Puryear *'' Post Balzac'' (1990) by

Judith Shea Judith Shea is an American sculptor and artist, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1948. She received a degree in fashion design at Parsons School of Design in 1969 and a BFA in 1975. This dual education formed the basis for her figure based ...

*''Seating for eight'' (1990) and ''Café Table 1'' (1992) by

Scott Burton Scott Burton (June 23, 1939 – December 29, 1989) was an American sculptor and performance artist best known for his large-scale furniture sculptures in granite and bronze. Early years Burton was born in Greensboro, Alabama to Walter Scott Bu ...

*''Untitled'' (1994) by

Ellsworth Kelly Ellsworth Kelly (May 31, 1923 – December 27, 2015) was an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker associated with hard-edge painting, Color Field painting and minimalism. His works demonstrate unassuming techniques emphasizing line, c ...

*'' Thinker on a Rock'' (1997) by

*''Spider'' (1997) by

*''LOVE'' (1999) by Robert Indiana *''Back of a Snowman (black)'' (2002) and ''Back of Snowman (white)'' (2002) by

Gary Hume Gary Stewart Hume (born 9 May 1962) is an English artist. Hume's work is strongly identified with the YBA who came to prominence in the early 1990s. Hume lives and works in London and Accord, New York.

*''Willy'' (2005) by Tony Smith *''Moonrise.east.january'' (2005) and ''Moonrise.east.august'' (2006) by Ugo Rondinone *''air gets into everything even nothing'' (2006) by

Ugo Rondinone Ugo Rondinone (born November 30, 1964) is a Swiss-born artist widely recognized for his mastery of several different media—most prominently sculpture, drawing and painting, but also photography, architecture, video and sound installation— ...

*''Nomade'' (2007) by

*''Untitled (Three Dancing Figures, version C)'' (2009) by

*''White Ghost'' (2010) by

*''Panoramic Awareness pavilion'' (2013) by

Olafur Eliasson Olafur Eliasson ( is, Ólafur Elíasson; born 5 February 1967) is an Icelandic–Danish artist known for sculptured and large-scale installation art employing elemental materials such as light, water, and air temperature to enhance the viewer's ...

*''Iron tree trunk'' (2015) by

*''Pumpkin Large'' (2018) by Yayoi Kusama

Selected works

''Nomade'' (2007) by Jaume Plensa

One of the most arresting and iconic pieces in the Pappajohn Sculpture Park is ''Nomade'' by Spanish sculptor Jaume Plensa, which dominates the landscape over Locust Street. The sculpture was originally exhibited in 2007, in the then newly restored Saint-Jaume bastion, in

Antibes Antibes (, also , ; oc, label=Provençal dialect, Provençal, Antíbol) is a coastal city in the Alpes-Maritimes Departments of France, department of southeastern France, on the French Riviera, Côte d'Azur between Cannes and Nice. The town of ...

. Subsequently, the sculpture was acquired by Mary and John Pappajohn in Miami, while the city of Antibes

Juan-les-Pins Juan-les-Pins (; oc, Joan dei Pins) is a town in the commune of Antibes in the Alpes-Maritimes department in Southeastern France. Located on the French Riviera, it is situated between Nice and Cannes, to the southwest of Nice Côte d'Azur Airport ...

ordered a similar work by Plensa to be installed there permanently. The sculpture is a , crouching human shape made of a lattice of white painted steel letters. The sculpture is hollow and visitors can walk inside to look through the spaces between the letters. This work exemplifies Plensa's exploration of communication issues between individuals or cultures, as well as his interest in literature and the human body. The letters do not form meaningful words, but rather express the symbolic essence of language. In a ''

Des Moines Register ''The Des Moines Register'' is the daily morning newspaper of Des Moines, Iowa. History Early period The first newspaper in Des Moines was the ''Iowa Star''. In July 1849, Barlow Granger began the paper in an abandoned log cabin by the junction ...

'' poll about 75 percent of the people surveyed chose ''Nomade'' as the piece they most connected with.

References

External links

John and Mary Pappajohn Sculpture Park, Des Moines Art Center
{{authority control Sculpture gardens, trails and parks in the United States Urban public parks Parks in Iowa Tourist attractions in Des Moines, Iowa Geography of Des Moines, Iowa