The Arc of Dreams: A Gap Eighty Feet Above the River
Near Sioux Falls, South Dakota
Dale Lamphere had been thinking about blades of prairie grass. He is a South Dakota sculptor and the state's artist laureate, and he understood that the most obvious subject for a monumental work in Sioux Falls was the one thing everyone already knew: the river and the falls. The question was what to say about them that hadn't already been said.
What he built instead was something about aspiration. The Arc of Dreams is a pair of stainless-steel arches, each inspired by a blade of grass bending toward the other across the Big Sioux River, spanning roughly the length of a football field between the banks. Each arch is a helix, the cross-section rotates as it rises, so the light catches it differently depending on where you stand and what time of day it is.
At the center, high above the river, there is a gap. The two arcs reach toward each other and do not meet. This is the point. The gap is intentional, Lamphere described it as representing the leap of faith that dreamers must make to see their visions through. The ambition and the risk. The moment before you know whether it works.
The sculpture was completed in twenty nineteen and installed along the riverbank between Sixth and Eighth Streets in downtown Sioux Falls. It grew out of SculptureWalk, the program that has brought rotating works of public art to the city every year.
Prairie grass grows tall here in summer. When the wind moves through it, the blades lean and nearly touch. Lamphere was watching that.
