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From Ashes to Art

By Bernie Hunhoff

Randall Blaze lost his home and art studio to fire, but the Pine Ridge Reservation sculptor is rising from the ashes.

Pine Ridge artist Randall Blaze hurried home from a grocery trip to Rapid City on an April evening in 2020 because he was eager to watch a TV documentary on Ernest Hemingway. Blaze lit a candle and set it on the arm of an upholstered chair. The next thing he knew, the chair was a ball of fire and within minutes the entire house was burning.

Flames were surely visible for many miles around because Blaze’s property sits atop Cuny Table, a mesa on the southern edge of the Badlands. However, nobody was watching. Nobody came to his rescue. The nearest fire truck was an hour away in any direction, and within minutes the entire studio was afire.

In the morning, Blaze surveyed the smoldering rubble. Sculpture tools, brushes, bronze artworks, furniture and business records were all lost. Though the fire didn’t spread across the grassy prairie, it did blacken a cottonwood tree that provided shade to the west side of the house. It was the lone tree on his 100 acres.

Cuny Table was settled by the Cunys, who arrived from Wyoming in 1880. Several of the young men married Native women; 50 years later, more than 100 families called it home. Many were Charles Cuny’s descendants. They had a school, church, dance hall and a few stores.

However, most were forced to leave in 1942 when the U.S. Army appropriated 340,000 acres in the Badlands for a bombing range. Families were given two weeks to pack up and go. Many of the young men joined the military.

Cuny Table and the entire region continued to be a practice range for the U.S. Air Force until 1958, and then was used by the South Dakota Air National Guard until 1974 when tribal leaders began to negotiate with the government for a return of the confiscated property.

Though Blaze was born and raised in Montana, his mother was a Cuny.”It turned out that Mom owned 17-and-a-half acres of trust land,” he says.”She and her family were moved out for the bombing range, and nobody came back. Every time a relative died, the executor of the estate would urge us all to sell, but I always objected.”

Myriad art faces are embedded around Blaze’s land on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Blaze joined the Navy and served on a refrigerated cargo ship during the Vietnam War.”One of the nicest things that ever happened to me was the GI bill, which gave me a month of education for every month I served.” He studied art at the University of Montana and was fascinated to learn about a variety of materials from Rudy Autio, a renowned ceramics professor and artist whose work garnered international acclaim.

Early in his career, Blaze devoted his creative energies to making jewelry, but he grew disillusioned by his customers’ lack of appreciation for the art form.”All they saw was a product, and it became all about the money.” Like Autio, he began to experiment with various materials, including bronze, metal and ceramics.

He also began to explore his Lakota roots at Cuny Table and started to buy his relatives’ small holdings; over the course of several years, he acquired 100 acres. Inspired by the solitude and the natural environment, he dreamed of building a studio and home there in the early 1990s, though he didn’t have the resources. Then came a visitor.

“One day my friend Rich Red Owl stopped over and said, ‘I hear you need a studio.’ I told him that I wished I could build one, but I didn’t have the money,” Blaze said, recalling the conversation.

“Do you have $1,500?” Red Owl asked.

“I have about that much,” Blaze said.

“Then let’s get started,” said Red Owl.

Blaze got a lesson in Indian-genuity. Red Owl showed him how to salvage and scavenge for inexpensive building materials, and before long he was moving into a 3,000-square-foot home that became known as the Oglala Art Center.

His career began to grow. He won fellowships at the Smithsonian and the Heard Museum in Phoenix, and his bronzes were featured at exhibitions in Japan, Germany and Australia. He authored a book, Heartdreams and Legends, on the contributions of indigenous artists of the United States and Australia. Seven Council Fires, a nonprofit that exhibits Native arts and crafts, marketed his sculptures worldwide.

Though he traveled the world, Blaze found that he was happiest when creating art at his humble studio. He rented most of his land to neighboring farmers but maintained a buffer of wild grass between his home and the crops.”After seeing what Agent Orange did to some of my friends in Vietnam, I just wanted some space between me and the chemical sprays,” he explains.

When a neighbor’s cattle trampled his yard and damaged some tipis that he had created as mini studios, he started a fence of driftwood to keep out the cows. Soon he assimilated art into the fence. Often, his pieces show faces of figures, perhaps in a spiritual search. Maybe they represent relatives who were driven from Cuny Table generations ago, or ancestors who were killed at Wounded Knee, which is just 20 miles to the east.

Blaze has gained attention in his home state over the past 20 years as a popular participant in the state arts council’s Artists in the Schools program.”I love working with the kids,” he says.”I am always amazed at what they can do.” He often incorporates his trademark faces into his teaching, and sometimes he takes samples of the students’ works back to Cuny Table and finds a place for them in his fence and wild garden.

When the original studio burned in 2020, he wasn’t sure, at the age of 71, that he had the energy or resources to rebuild. His friend Red Owl is now too elderly to help. But other support has arrived. Someone gave him a camper trailer. He salvaged what he could from the old house and became a regular shopper at Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore in Rapid City.

Blaze built a driftwood fence around his Cuny Table home to keep cattle away from the studio. The fence has become part of the art.

“That place is wonderful. But I was paying whatever they asked for windows and doors until my grandson suggested to me that I could dicker with them,” he grinned.”Guess what I paid for this window? It had been there for months, and I told them it wasn’t selling very fast. I got it for $95.”

In 2023 he was awarded a $5,000 fellowship from the South Dakota Arts Council to help fund the next studio. His adult grandchildren came from Utah to help install windows and start a deck.

He recognizes that his style of architecture and the isolation of living on Cuny Table are acquired tastes. He was married and he’s had several lady friends,”but not a lot of women want to live out here where a toilet is a luxury.” Winters are long, even for the solitary artist; he spent the last few at St. Petersburg, Florida, because he hasn’t yet restored electrical service or plumbing.

“You can get stuck out here for six weeks or more in winter,” he says.”The wind blows all the time, and when it snows it can be incredibly beautiful, like waves on the ocean. St. Petersburg has art galleries and studios and people everywhere, but I get lonely there and by spring I’m happy to get back here.”

He likes being visited by badgers, coyotes, bobcats and deer. A sense of quiet permeates the outdoors; he can hear Canada geese approaching in the sky long before he can see them.

While winterizing the studio in preparation for his trip south, he saw that the cottonwood tree that burned in the 2020 fire had sprouted leaves on its bottom branches.”I thought that was dead after the fire,” he said.

The same might have been said about his studio. Though its reincarnation is primitive by Florida standards ó by just about any standards ó it fits nicely on Cuny Table.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2024 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Making Dignity

By Paul Higbee

Dignity, a 50-foot-tall stainless-steel tribute to indigenous culture, stands on a Missouri River bluff near Chamberlain. Photo by Chad Coppess

Editor’s Note: This story appeared in the September/October 2016 issue of South Dakota Magazine in conjunction with the unveiling of Dale Lamphere’s grand sculpture Dignity of Earth and Sky along the Missouri River near Chamberlain.

For a year and a half, anticipation built across South Dakota and beyond about Dignity, Dale Lamphere’s 50-foot sculpture that overlooks the Missouri River from a dominant bluff. Millions see it every year as they drive past Chamberlain on Interstate 90.

The stainless-steel statue depicts a Native woman with a star quilt and is both traditional and boldly innovative in design. The traditional: the figure of the woman whose dress, leggings and moccasins are authentic to the mid-1800s, and whose face is an amalgamation of three Lakota women Lamphere used as models. The innovative: motion and changing light in the quilt, with more than 100 blue diamond shapes that move with the wind, fluttering”like an aspen leaf,” Lamphere explains.

Rapid City entrepreneurs Norm and Eunabel McKie put more than a million dollars into the project. They speak of Dignity as”alive” and, Norm says, carrying a burden of responsibility”to inspire all people to maximize their lives, and also to combat suicide,” sadly prevalent on nearby reservations.

South Dakota Artist Laureate Dale Lamphere’s Dignity took shape during the summer of 2016.

The McKies, owners of the McKie Ford/Lincoln car dealership in Rapid City, started talking in 2008 about giving something back to the state that’s been so good to them. Norm went to another Rapid City businessman, architect Pat Wyss, and over time they discussed possible projects. The day came, Norm remembers, when he realized”we could have this iconic sculpture, on the Missouri, in the heart of the state.” Wyss remained with the project from those conceptual discussions to placement at Chamberlain. He is landscape architect for the site, incorporating the hill’s natural slope toward the highway into the pedestal. The McKies and Wyss knew that in Lamphere, they were involving not only an artist of the highest caliber, but someone who shared their deep respect for South Dakota’s Native peoples.

Dignity also contributes to South Dakota tourism, an aspect of the project that excites supporters for reasons beyond revenue. The statue shines a light on the state’s center, too often overlooked by visitors, and makes a powerful statement about modern South Dakotans’ respect for the region’s original residents and cultures.

As South Dakotans know well, these art forms can take a long time to reach fruition. In this case, though, things moved swiftly after a lunch with Gov. Dennis Daugaard where the Dignity concept was explained in detail.”Let’s make this happen,” the governor said to staff who were present. State government quickly committed to having the statue stand on South Dakota-owned land, at the busy I-90 rest area just east of the river and south of Chamberlain, a place offering a sweeping view of the Missouri, bluffs and prairie.

Lamphere gave the project instant credibility. He’s been a professional sculptor for 50 years, with his main studio in the Black Hills foothills near Sturgis. Lamphere has more than 60 major commissions to his credit across the United States, from the Basilica of the National Shrine in Washington, D.C., to art at the Eisenhower Medical Center in southern California. Recent pieces have been installed in Dallas, Kansas City, Chicago and San Antonio. In his home state, Lamphere’s work is prominent at the state capitol building and public venues from Sioux Falls to Spearfish. Human subjects range from spiritual figures to strong and resilient residents of the Great Plains, many of them women.

Over his career, Lamphere has embraced big-scale sculpture (consider his 33-foot tall Sacred Heart of Jesus and Immaculate Heart of Mary, Queen of Peace works at Sioux City, Iowa). That quality draws inevitable comparisons to two historic South Dakota sculptors — Gutzon Borglum (Mount Rushmore) and Korczak Ziolkowski (Crazy Horse Memorial). Lamphere is quick to say he doesn’t consider himself in that league, a self-assessment over which others might squabble. In 2013, the day after he was presented the Governor’s Award in the Arts for his lifetime of distinctive creative achievement, Lamphere was greeted with a long ovation in the state legislature chambers — applause any high-ranking political leader would envy. In 2015 he was named South Dakota Artist Laureate.

More than 100 blue diamond shapes flutter with the wind “like an aspen leaf,” Lamphere says.

Lamphere began creating Dignity by first drawing the form, then sculpting a one eighth-scale model. He communicated regularly with the McKies, who, he notes,”let me pursue my highest vision.”

That vision — including incorporation of light, color and fluttering movement in the quilt — stemmed almost entirely from Lamphere’s imagination.”One of the advantages of living out here in relative isolation is how I have no idea what the rest of the world is doing,” the sculptor says.”So I play around in my imagination.”

The spot where the statue began taking form, where Lamphere multiplied precise measurements from the model and transferred them to steel, is truly isolated. It’s a worksite he’s used before, about 44 miles east of Rapid City on Highway 44, near the Cheyenne River. The location makes it easily accessible to Native people who live in rural southwestern South Dakota, and many stopped by to offer encouragement.”That means a lot,” Lamphere says.

For visitors, the site felt more like a ranch where workers would gather for branding rather than creating art. The Black Hills could be seen off in the distance, with miles of golden prairie in between. About 200 buffalo roam the ranch, and stacked hay bales and tractors decorated the homestead. Dozens of colorful and loud peacocks added flair.

Lamphere fit right in at the Spirited Winds Tatanka Ranch, with his western attire and manner. A shed served as the work base, crammed with tools and home to 30 or 40 kittens and an antler collection. But in front of that shed Dignity rose, surrounded by scaffolding for workers.”They have no idea,” Lamphere quipped,”how tiring it is for me to stand on the ground and yell instructions up to them.”

The ranch is in Tom Trople’s family. Trople has been Lamphere’s chief welder for three decades. Trople had a quip of his own.”These days Dale is pretty understanding that you can’t bend metal every direction — although sometimes he wants to.” Trople has worked on about 20 of Lamphere’s large-scale works, taller than 20 feet.”During that time, Dale’s become more like a brother than employer,” Trople says.

Lamphere transferred measurements from a scale model to the stainless steel sculpture, which took shape on a ranch east of Rapid City.

The involvement of highly regarded sculptors Jim Maher, Andy Roltgen and Grant Standard made the crew something of a dream team. Another important contribution came from Brook Loobey, an automotive paint expert who tackled the challenge of experimenting with colors for the quilt’s diamond-shaped pieces and implied beadwork. He and Lamphere studied color shades in the sun and imagined how those colors might change under different shades of natural light.

Workers dealt with windy conditions along the Cheyenne, which reminded them that the wind is a factor along the Missouri, too. Early on, Lamphere worked with Albertson Engineering of Rapid City to make certain Dignity withstands the most brutal prairie blasts South Dakota can produce. Openings through the quilt, where the diamond shapes hang, help with the wind load.

In considering Dignity‘s full impact, more is at work than the intentions of the artist, benefactors and state of South Dakota. The venue — this exact bluff — witnessed complex history that is intertwined with the art’s statement. Lewis and Clark’s party camped directly across the river in 1804, and traditionally their story has been interpreted as a grand American adventure, with a Native woman playing a key role. But as historians and activists hammered home during the expedition’s bicentennial, those who followed the Lewis and Clark route brought diseases that devastated Native peoples of the Great Plains, Rocky Mountains and Pacific Northwest. Below the bluffs are a rail bed and trestle, reminders of the great political power railroads wielded in opening West River country to immigrants, greatly reducing reservation lands the Lakota people believed would be theirs forever. And the water below the bluff is called Lake Francis Case as often as the Missouri River, because dams completely altered South Dakota’s stretch of the river in the 1950s and ’60s and further stole reservation acreage.

Despite those and other historical indignities, the sculpture boldly proclaims that South Dakota’s Native cultures are alive, standing with dignity.

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The Cowboy’s Artist

By John Andrews

Tony Chytka fired his sculpture of saddle bronc champion Clint Johnson in his Belle Fourche foundry.

A BLACK CAT PURRS beside a homemade kiln that would raise the eyebrow of any OSHA inspector, but Tony Chytka doesn’t seem worried.”They would probably have a fit with me, but I’m the only one out here,” he says.

“Out here” is Chytka’s 360-acre ranch, which lies in a zigzag of red dirt roads southeast of Belle Fourche along the Belle Fourche River, part of the historic Redwater Irrigation District. The peak of Bear Butte, some 20 miles away and still snowcapped on an early May morning, is just visible on the southeastern horizon. He bought the place 20 years ago. He keeps a few cows and horses and puts up some hay. Chykta also does some irrigating; piles of irrigation pipe lie near an old tin cattle shed that doubles as a foundry, where Chytka produces some of the best contemporary Western art in North America.

When we spoke, Chytka was laboring on a 3/4 life size sculpture of Spearfish native and four-time PRCA world saddle bronc riding champion Clint Johnson. When it was unveiled in August of 2019 at the Casey Tibbs Rodeo Center in Fort Pierre, it became the third and final piece added to the center’s sculpture garden, which is a tribute to South Dakota’s amazing history of exceptional saddle bronc riders.

Chytka has been on a lifelong path to becoming one of the country’s premier Western artists. He grew up on a farm west of Yankton; his surname (pronounced KIT-ka) is typical of the Bohemian families who settled that country in the late 1860s and 1870s. Growing up, he developed two passions — art and rodeo. The Chytka property also included the local saddle club arena, where South Dakota rodeo greats like Casey Tibbs performed. Chytka became enamored with rodeo at a young age. He remembers that after school at the one-room Longfellow District 11, he held on for dear life to a barrel suspended by ropes while his older brothers tugged the lines, simulating a teeth-chattering bronc ride. That led to competition in Little Britches and the high school rodeo club.

Teachers at Longfellow and the high school also encouraged his artistic endeavors. He took art classes and was introduced to sculpture during his senior year through clay modeling. While the other students were fashioning clay pots, Chytka created some 300 individual fired one-of-a-kind ceramic pieces.

After the Casey Tibbs Rodeo Center opened in 2009, Chytka donated sculptures of Casey Tibbs (left) and trick rider Mattie Goff-Newcombe.

After graduating in 1972, Chytka enrolled at the University of South Dakota in Springfield. He took as many art classes as he could and became a member of the rodeo team, competing in bull riding and bareback bronc riding. He transferred to Black Hills State University in Spearfish in 1974, where he continued studying art and rodeoing. Chytka became a contemporary of Clint Johnson, who was on the rodeo team at South Dakota State University in Brookings.”He was a very strong rider,” Chytka recalls.”Very positive and an easy-going guy. Always had a chuckle to him.”

Drive around Belle Fourche and you’ll see evidence of Chytka’s success in Western art. Sculptures honoring brothers Marvin and Mark Garrett, two of the nation’s best bareback bronc riders, stand at the corner of Sixth and State streets. Another Chytka creation called Legacy, placed along Highway 85, was completed for the South Dakota centennial in 1989. Chytka has also memorialized Jerry Olson, a former rodeo clown and bullfighter from nearby Fruitdale, and his tribute to 1920s trick rider Mattie Goff-Newcombe can be found in Sturgis.

Chytka’s pieces are part of private collections around the world. Several are on display at the ProRodeo Hall of Fame in Colorado Springs, Colorado. So when the Casey Tibbs Rodeo Center was becoming a reality in the mid-2000s, and its directors sought art to place inside, they turned to Chytka, who donated two pieces that greet visitors as they enter: Casey Tibbs in the moments leading up to a bronc ride and Goff-Newcombe performing at the Faith Fair and Rodeo in 1928.

“He’s really a perfect fit,” says Cindy Bahe, longtime director of the center.”He’s a rodeo guy and rode broncs, so he knows exactly the stature of the cowboy and the animal. They are pretty true to life.”

The center sought Chytka’s expertise again when planning began for a sculpture garden overlooking the Missouri River. Johnny Smith, a former board member of the Casey Tibbs Foundation, was particularly proud of South Dakota’s saddle bronc riding champions and wanted to honor the very best. Plans called for three sculptures, all produced in Chytka’s Belle Fourche foundry. The first, placed in 2013, depicts Ree Heights native and five-time world saddle bronc riding champion Billy Etbauer scoring 89 atop Painted Valley at the 2009 Cheyenne Frontier Days. The second, added in 2018, is Casey Tibbs on The Old Gray Mare, honoring his performance at the Cheyenne Frontier Days in 1949, the year he won his first of six world saddle bronc riding championships. Clint Johnson, a four-time world champion, took his place in 2019.

Legacy, completed for the state centennial in 1989, was Chytka’s first large-scale piece. It stands along Highway 85 in Belle Fourche.

For Chytka, the creative process begins with a pose that perfectly encapsulates the subject and the context of the piece.”Then I’ll use other photographs to try to get a three-dimensional draw from it,” Chytka says.”It’s really hard to work off a flat surface when you’re working three dimensionally. That’s what’s unique about it. You can walk around to the other side and see the depth of it.”

Those drawings eventually become a table-size clay model on which Chytka does the brunt of the shaping and sculpting.”That’s where you do all the designing, work out all the detailing and that type of thing. There are certain guides you can use for the length of the horse’s head, the legs. A lot of it is just the view. I like to just stand back and see it all together.”

Over the next four to six months, the project goes through various stages. A rubber layer is applied on the outside of the clay, and then plaster of Paris on top of that. The process yields a wax version of the sculpture, and a ceramic shell is built around it. When the wax is melted, the shell is ready to receive molten bronze from Chytka’s homemade kiln.

Chytka brought his pieces to other foundries until 1984, when he learned the process himself at a foundry in Bozeman, Montana.”The casting process has always intrigued me,” he says.”When you use commercial foundries, pretty soon all the work from that foundry starts to look the same. There’s just as much art in the foundry process as the beginning sculpture.”

His kiln, fueled by propane and powered by a Kirby vacuum motor, heats the bronze to 2,200 degrees. It’s a two man pour, he says, meaning a man at each end of an 8-foot-long metal tong holds the piece as it’s dipped into the furnace (the 10-foot tong was too hard to handle, he explains).”After it cools you can hit the bottom of the shell with a hammer and you aren’t going to hurt it,” he says.”The permanence of it is something I always liked.”

Chytka sculpted Johnson atop Kicking Bear, the horse he rode to win his fourth championship in 1989 (his previous titles came in 1980, 1987 and 1988). Visitors who attended the unveiling surely appreciated its artistic merits, but when old cowboys — and even Chytka himself — glance into the horse’s eyes or see the way Johnson sits in the saddle, they might be transported to their old rodeo days. There will be features that only those who’ve landed on their backside in the arena will notice.

“There are little things. Positioning, the equipment, the action and that kind of thing,” Chykta says.”I’m not hung up too much on detail, just as long as it flows. But when somebody who does know rodeo says, ëHey, you did a good job on that,’ then that means just that much more, coming from people who have been there.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 2019 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Grottos of South Dakota

By Michael Zimny

The Midwest was host to a unique folk art movement in the early 20th century, as German-American Catholics brought with them the grotto tradition. There are two small grottos in South Dakota, on opposite ends of the state: Saint Peter’s in Farmer, and Saint Martin’s in Oelrichs.

The Midwestern grotto tradition was kickstarted by Father Paul Dobberstein with the Grotto of the Redemption in West Bend, Iowa. Near-death experiences are a common theme in grotto-building origin stories. Father Dobberstein promised the Virgin Mary that if he survived a bout with pneumonia, he would build one. And he did. In 1894, he built a small grotto, Our Lady of Lourdes, at the Saint Francis de Sales Seminary outside Milwaukee.

He wasn’t done though. He began to amass a collection of boulders for his magnum opus, which he began in 1912 and continued until his death in 1954. A parishioner named Matt Szerence helped him from the start, continuing also until his death in 1959.

The two artists often made excavation runs to the Black Hills, returning with rocks removed by miners or railroads. They studded the surfaces with colorful minerals, gemstones, petrified wood and glass. The Grotto of the Redemption is actually a series of nine grottos that tell the Catholic story of Redemption, beginning with the Fall of Man and culminating with the Resurrection.

Perhaps the second most famous Midwestern grotto is the Dickeyville Grotto and Shrines, built by Father Matthias Wernerus in the eponymous small Wisconsin town between 1925 and 1930. Probably inspired in part by Dobberstein’s work, Dickeyville is a tribute to God and country, combining patriotic and religious themes. With his splashy use of color — utilizing semi-precious stones, glass and pottery shards — Wernerus prefigured later religious folk artists, working in different mediums, like Howard Finster at Paradise Gardens or Leonard Knight at Salvation Mountain.

The South Dakota grottos are neither as grand in scale as the Grotto of the Redemption, or as visually frenetic as Dickeyville.

Saint Martin’s in Oelrichs is the most austere, relying less on colorfully ornamented concrete, and more on the stone bounty of the Southern Black Hills to recreate a naturalistic cavern for the Virgin Mary. Father Gerhard Stakemeir, another German American priest, built the icon between 1932 and 1934, with help from parishioner Nick Bogner. According to the National Register of Historic Places, Stakemeir and Bogner utilized, “petrified wood and moss, and fossils taken from Wind Cave National Park.

“The car tunnels leading through Wind Cave National Park were being enlarged in the late 1920s and early 1930s, which left vast amounts of debris … Bogner used a trailer and his Buick to haul the rocks from the passes to aid Father Stakemeir’s project.”

The bells no longer ring at Saint Martin’s, which closed as a church in 1999, a victim of rural decline. The property owner maintains the grotto, which receives few visitors.

Father Peter Scheier built the Byzantine-style Saint Peter’s grotto in Farmer between 1926 and 1933. Scheier may have been more influenced by his contemporaries in West Bend and Dickeyville than Father Stakemeir was at Oelrichs. The facade of the turrets and walls at Farmer are decoratively studded with thousands of fresh-water seashells and shards of colored glass, among the gathered stones. Like Stakemeir, and even Paul Dobberstein, Scheier made excursions to the Black Hills to gather materials. The Farmer grotto is cherished by alums and locals, some of whom took part in a restoration project in the early 2000s.

Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but Lemmon’s Petrified Wood Park — one of South Dakota’s great folk art monuments, which could be seen as a secular take on the grotto movement, in which fossils and stone foster the contemplation of deep time (or at least put Lemmon on the map) rather than the glorification of God — was built during the peak of the Midwestern grotto-building era (1930-1932).

In its grandiosity of scale, Ole Quammen’s Petrified Wood Park shares more in common with the Grotto of the Redemption or Dickeyville than Stakemeir’s or Scheier’s smaller icons, nearly swallowed by the prairie and demography.

Saint Martin’s and Saint Peter’s remain modest reminders of an interesting moment in sacral folk art.

Michael Zimny is the social media engagement specialist for South Dakota Public Broadcasting in Vermillion. He blogs for SDPB and contributes arts columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.

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A Pheasantless Huron?

By Michael Zimny

The World’s Largest Pheasant has been a mainstay in Huron for 60 years. Now its future may be in doubt.

Pheasants Forever is the name of one pheasant-concerned conservation group, but can any pheasant — even the World’s Largest Pheasant — truly live forever?

The World’s Largest, a prominent piece of Huron’s skyline since 1959, has sustained serious damage to its structural integrity in its 60 years, and that damage — paired with the fact that the ringneck’s perch is not on city-owned property — presents Huron with the possibility of a pheasant-free future.

The city has a lease agreement — which requires some light pheasant maintenance — with the owners of the structure built around the bird. That lease, negotiated 20 years ago with prior owners of the property, expires in 2020. Meanwhile, current ownership wants to sell the property.

Laurie Shelton is President of the Huron Chamber and Visitor’s Bureau. She says the phesant’s future is subject to the whims of any potential new owner. “If that owner did not want it there, then we have looked at what the cost would be to build a new pheasant, and then to put that on city-owned property,” Shelton says.

However, a move might not be an option. “We have had engineers look at it,” Shelton says, “and they do not feel, because of the integrity of the fiberglass, that it would be able to be moved soundly.”

Schaun Schnathorst is an engineering technician for the city of Huron. He has repaired and repainted the bird twice in the last eight years. (The last touch-up was just a few weeks ago). He agrees that moving the bird would be a risky endeavor. “When you can lean up against that bird and you push it in — in almost any given area because that’s how thin the fiberglass is — it’s definitely going to be a challenge to move it,” Schnathorst says.

Over the course of 60 years, the fiberglass pheasant has been nested in by hundreds of pigeons, bombarded with UV rays and hailstorms, infiltrated with water, and even taken a lightning strike to the head. “If you look up inside that pheasant you can see daylight,” says Schnathorst, adding that some of the original steel mesh frame inside the fiberglass is nonexistent. “So how are you going to strap on to a pheasant and lift it, and not have it cave in with its own weight?”

The Chamber conducted a local survey and found broad support for preserving the pheasant as long as possible. “We like the old pheasant,” Shelton says. “If we could work something out as far as the lease, that would probably be the least expensive [option]. It’s really kind of a dilemma, and it’s not one that’s been easy to deal with. We wish that it was on city-owned property because then we wouldn’t be having these discussions at all.”

“I really think, through social media and how many likes and comments it got after I did a little touch up to it, that the people of Huron want to try to keep it, and keep it in good shape for as long as they possibly can,” Schnathorst says.”Unfortunately, there will probably come a day when it’s just run its course. It’s not Mount Rushmore. It’s not made out of stone.”

Huron commissioned sculptor Robert Jacobs of Idaho to create the city’s massive fiberglass pheasant in 1959. The ringneck stands 28 feet tall, and measures about 40 feet from beak to tail.

The dedication ceremony, held on the pheasant season opener, starred former governor and pheasant hunting enthusiast Joe Foss, who reportedly fired several blanks from his shotgun at the bird as he departed in his helicopter. Sen. Francis Case and Congressman George McGovern were also on hand.

The initial funding for the project was provided by the local Jaycees, but the owner of the Plains Motel, in front of which the bird stood, had to cough up an outstanding $5,000 at the last minute to keep the disgruntled sculptor from torching his bird.

The World’s Largest Pheasant still makes headlines, and for that reason, you can’t count it out. The bird weathered adversity as new owners took over its roost. One such scare in the late 1990s even had other towns giving him the poacher’s eye.

He stands for now, barrel-breasted, proud-beaked, with a fresh coat of paint, unfazed by the uncertainty in the ground beneath his feet.

Michael Zimny is the social media engagement specialist for South Dakota Public Broadcasting in Vermillion. He blogs for SDPB and contributes arts columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.

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A Bunch of Bull

By Michael Zimny

The most prominent feature in downtown Miller is a pair of bull sculptures — a Hereford and an Angus — mounted several feet above street-level at the town’s central four-way stop.

If you’re passing through, you might wonder: what’s their story?

“The bulls were put up to recognize ranching efforts in Hand County, where we raised mostly Hereford and Angus cattle,” says Tammy Caffee, the Executive Director of On Hand Development Corporation — a non-profit dedicated to expanding economic opportunity in the Miller area — and lifetime Miller resident.

In the late 1950s, a group of local cattlemen — including brothers Ted and Clayton Jennings, who won many honors for their Angus breeds, as well as Paul Robinson and Art Magness — got together and raised a monument to every beef eater’s favorite Scottish import. Not to be outdone, a local Hereford rancher placed a monument to his own breed across the street. Except for one brief hiatus, the bulls have stood at their stations ever since.

“There was a short period of time when they were taken down,” Caffee says.”People were very upset about that. [The bulls] are our icons here in Miller. The reason they’re important to us is because the ranching industry was important to us. Over the years now, many ranchers have turned to just farming. But the bulls are very dear to us.”

Michael Zimny is the social media engagement specialist for South Dakota Public Broadcasting in Vermillion. He blogs for SDPB and contributes arts columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.

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Arcing Across the Big Sioux

Last weekend, crews began installing the first half of Sturgis sculptor Dale Lamphere’s massive Arc of Dreams. The stainless steel sculpture, which is nearly the length of a football field, will consist of two arms curving up from the banks of the Big Sioux River in downtown Sioux Falls. The 18-foot gap in the middle symbolizes the leap of faith people must often take to make their dreams come true. Photos by Paul Schiller.
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The One That Got Away … Briefly

By Michael Zimny

A unique sculpture in Spearfish reminds us of a time when a national public art program was possible.

Fish Story — a tri-part set of sculptures — was created by artist Marion Overby for the old Spearfish post office. The New Deal’s rural post office murals brought art that dignified rural life to accessible settings.

An alumnus of the influential Cranbrook Academy of Art who later worked alongside designers Charles and Ray Eames, Overby received commissions from at least two small town post offices during the New Deal era. Her terra-cotta relief mural Early Postman is still on display at the post office in Mason, Michigan.

The old Spearfish Post Office was built in 1940, as part of an accelerated federal building program. The simple style and brick facade are typical of “Class C” post offices built in small towns during the era. The sculpture was commissioned in 1943. Overby wrote that she named the piece Fish Story because, “I am sure the country around Spearfish is full of tall tales of fishing and record-breaking catches.”

Carved from California walnut, the sculpture depicts a Native American fisherman with a spear and a non-Native fisherman in waders with rod-and-reel. Despite their differences in hairstyle and dress, both men look nearly identical. A fish trio swims between them.

“When this building was abandoned by the post office in 1996, the Smithsonian came and took it to D.C.,” says Kathy Standen, a personal banker at Great Western Bank, which occupies the old post office building today. “When the bank reopened in 1999, our bank president went to Senator Daschle and asked him if we could have that artwork back. Senator Daschle made it available for us and then they brought it back and put it back up on the wall.”

Michael Zimny is the social media engagement specialist for South Dakota Public Broadcasting in Vermillion. He blogs for SDPB and contributes arts columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.

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A Monumental Sculpture

Our September/October issue includes a story on Dale Lamphere’s Dignity, a 50-foot sculpture depicting a Native American woman wrapped in a star quilt. Its unveiling is scheduled for September 17 on a Missouri River bluff near Chamberlain. Bernie Hunhoff visited the Spirited Winds Tatanka Ranch near Scenic where Lamphere and a team of welders worked this summer. His photos accompanied the story, but here are a few more that didn’t make the magazine.

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From Lagos to Lemmon

By Michael Zimny

Artists Dotun Popoola (left) and Jonathan Imafidor collaborated on a mural to honor legendary cattleman Ed Lemmon.

Sculptor John Lopez is collaborating with two Nigerian artists to transform an empty lot in downtown Lemmon into a tribute to the town’s founder. Boss Cowman Square will be unveiled on July 9 during this year’s Boss Cowman Days Celebration and Rodeo.

The square celebrates the town’s agricultural heritage and the legendary cowboy-turned-cattle baron who gave it his name. Lopez is creating a larger-than-life sculpture of Ed Lemmon, which will sit on a pedestal in the square. Artists Dotun Popoola and Jonathan Imafidor have painted a mural that depicts Lemmon leading cattle across the Missouri River.

Popoola is a curator for the National Gallery of Arts, Nigeria. Imafidor is an artist and instructor at Obafemi Awolowo University.

Dotun Popoola came across John Lopez’s work on the internet. Trained as a painter, he was experimenting with sculpture. The work intrigued him. He sent Lopez an email and received a quick response. Before he knew it, he was on a plane from Lagos to Minneapolis, then a bus to Bismarck where Lopez picked him up.

Popoola had exhibited in Miami, but had never seen a Perkins County sunset or so much wide-open space.”Where I was coming from, you could have 20, 30 people in a flat,” he says.”So populated. Everything was strange.”

But he soaked in the local culture, riding horses and branding. He found similarities between Yoruba and Lakota cultures, as well as between the cowboy culture of the American West and Nigerian herdsmen.

Popoola is a practitioner of the Araism art movement, an indigenous Nigerian/Yoruba painting technique — originated by artist Mufu Onifade — that involves layering mosaics of color on a canvas painted black. The name is derived from the Yoruba word for”wonder” — ara. Though the movement was developed as an authentic African painting technique, Popoola has explored depicting South Dakota through the eyes of Araism as well as through other techniques. (The mural at Boss Cowman Square is not an example of Araism.)

Heads Men juxtaposes an American cowboy with a Nigerian herdsman.

When some Lemmon locals began to envision the idea of Boss Cowman Square, John Lopez invited Dotun to come back and create a mural as a backdrop for his sculpture of Ed Lemmon. This time Popoola enlisted the help of friend and fellow artist Jonathan Imafidor.

Together the two artists explored intersections of American and Nigerian art and culture. Some of their work is on display in an exhibit at the John Lopez studio.

Their mural depicts Ed Lemmon and another cowboy leading longhorn cattle across the Missouri River and a vast expanse of prairie. The mural will serve as a backdrop for a larger-than-life sculpture of Ed Lemmon seated on a horse. True to the Lopez style, the sculpture is a hybrid of cast bronze, plasma cut steel and found elements that represent the regional agricultural heritage — pieces cut from an old roller mill used in grain elevators to separate rocks from grain add texture among the smoother surfaces.

Lemmon, known alternately as”Dad Lemmon” and”Boss Cowman” was a legendary cowboy who rose through the ranks from ordinary cowhand to cattle baron, running the Sheidley Cattle Company, then the L7 operation that ran cattle from Texas to Canada. One of the feats that made him famous was one of the largest cattle roundups in history.

“The open range cattle industry was just coming to a close,” says Nathan Sanderson — a historian, Gov. Dennis Daugaard’s Director of Policy and Operations and author of Controlled Recklessness: Ed Lemmon and the Open Range. “There were still some really large cattle operations out there — 40, 50, 60 thousand head or larger. And in the spring of 1902, he bossed one of the largest cattle roundups on the Northern Great Plains — probably 50,000 head, several dozen roundup wagons, hundreds of cowboys — and he did it in only a few days.”

John Lopez’s scrap iron depiction of Ed Lemmon atop a horse will be the centerpiece of the town’s artistic tribute to its founder.

Thanks to his knowledge of the range, and of the Missouri River, Lemmon played an instrumental role in the first railroad crossing, by the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad (or Milwaukee Road) of the Mighty Mo in 1907. Through his close relationship with the Milwaukee Road, he had an insider’s information on where new railroad towns would be platted, and bought some land in Lemmon. But unlike many railroad town founders, Lemmon put down roots.

“He was one of the few town builders who lived in the town of his name after the town sale,” says Sanderson.”As the community built up, he was an active participant in that. The citizens of Lemmon started calling him ‘Dad’ because he was the father of the town, and also because he was really good with kids. Lemmon’s annual Boss Cowman Celebration and Rodeo, and all of the various things in the community that are named after him testify to Ed Lemmon’s value to that particular region and to western South Dakota as a whole.”

If Ed Lemmon, literally, put Lemmon on the map, he also helped grow the cattle industry, and the legend of the American cowboy, into international exports. Now artists from his town and the other side of the world have come together to celebrate the Boss.

Michael Zimny is the social media engagement specialist for South Dakota Public Broadcasting in Vermillion. He blogs for SDPB and contributes arts columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.