SculptureWalk: The City That Resets Its Art Every May
Near Sioux Falls, South Dakota
Every May, Sioux Falls installs new sculptures throughout its downtown, and every May the previous year's sculptures mostly go away. It has been doing this since two thousand four. The program is called SculptureWalk, and by the time of its twenty-third annual exhibition it had placed hundreds of sculptures from artists around the world into the streets of a mid-sized prairie city.
The concept is deceptively simple. Works are selected by a jury. About fifty-five new pieces go up each spring, distributed across downtown sidewalks, plazas, and riverfront paths, where they remain for a full year. During the warmer months, the public votes for a People's Choice Award. At the end of the year, artists can sell their work to private buyers; some pieces are purchased by the city or private institutions and become permanent. Most cycle out.
What this creates, over two decades, is a city that has seen an extraordinary volume and range of public art without having to commit permanently to any single aesthetic. Sioux Falls has had abstract steel, figurative bronze, ceramic, kinetic work, folk-art-influenced carving, and pieces that reference the Great Plains landscape in forms you would not immediately recognize as prairie art.
The rotating nature of the program means that what you see today is not what someone saw here last May, and not what anyone will see next May. It makes the sculpture a kind of civic present tense: art that belongs to the season you are in, in a city that keeps renewing its visual argument about what it wants to be.
