The Pappajohn Sculpture Park and the New Des Moines

On the northwest edge of downtown Des Moines, where Grand Avenue meets a park of about four and a half acres, there are sculptures by artists you would not expect to find in a midwestern city. A Louise Bourgeois spider. A Richard Serra pentagon of steel plates. Works by Jaume Plensa, Keith Haring, and Deborah Butterfield. The Pappajohn Sculpture Park, which opened in two thousand nine, is one of the strongest collections of major contemporary sculpture installed in public space anywhere in the United States.

It arrived because of John Pappajohn, a Des Moines venture capitalist who began collecting art in the nineteen seventies and eventually assembled a collection significant enough to be taken seriously by major museums. Pappajohn donated the sculpture park, along with a contribution to the Des Moines Art Center, as a gift to the city. The collection is free and open every day.

The Des Moines Art Center itself, located in Greenwood Park on the west side, is worth noting. Its building is an addition collaboration between three of the twentieth century's most significant architects: Eliel Saarinen designed the original nineteen forty-eight structure, I.M. Pei added a wing in nineteen sixty-eight, and Richard Meier added another in nineteen eighty-five. Three distinct architectural voices in a single museum complex. Architectural historians consider it an unusual document of modernist progression.

What the sculpture park and the arts center together represent is a phenomenon that Des Moines shares with a handful of other midwestern cities: the cultivation of serious cultural institutions by local philanthropists who wanted their city to be taken seriously. The sculpture is not decorative. It is a statement. It says that Des Moines is a place where ambitious things are possible.

The park is a good place to sit and think about what kind of a city Des Moines is choosing to be.