Monuments Project - Iowa

The former Fort Dodge Grain Terminal silo stands ten storeys tall, overlooking the Des Moines River as it winds its way through the city of Fort Dodge, Iowa. With a population of approximately 25,000, Fort Dodge was founded as a military outpost but eventually became a locus of Iowa’s farming practices and other industries including gypsum and limestone mining.

Fort Dodge and the surrounding Des Moines River valley region was also blessed with abundant beds of clay, prompting the establishment of a thriving pottery industry in the mid-nineteenth century – including Fort Dodge Stoneware Company and White’s Pottery Works founded by German immigrant Martin White. Producing strong, durable vessels for storing food and liquids, such potteries were invaluable to the local community – stoneware is said to have been the near universal container in nineteenth-century America.¹

It is this history that Guido van Helten landed on as a point of interest for the development of the silo’s mural design. The artist spent time meeting, interviewing, and then photographing local residents modelling Iowa pottery items, creating studies for the seven characters featured in the final artwork.

These seven figures represent archetypes of modern diversity stemming largely from the migrant makeup of the Fort Dodge community, including a farmer, a teacher, student, mine worker, and African-American community leader. Each figure carries a different stoneware object, seemingly passing between them the various jars, pots, vases, and even a decorative clay figurine. These objects are stoneware artifacts housed in the collection of the nearby Fort Museum and Frontier Village – all crafted from the distinctive clay prized in the Fort Dodge area.

Although the characters depicted are meant to be representative of the community as a whole, rather than any specific individuals, the portraits are based on Van Helten’s photographic studies of local residents, including two notable personalities.

74 year-old Charlene Washington, a leader in the African-American community, arrived in Iowa from the rural South in 1964 at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, taking up an opportunity from one of several Iowa companies offering free rail tickets to economic migrants.

Dick Whitcomb is a retired war veteran and mineworker who was born and raised in Fort Dodge, leaving only to serve as a fighter pilot in during World War II, then working as a manager at one of the local gypsum plants.

Van Helten spent the cold final months of 2018 to realise the mural, designed to follow the multiple curves of the structure and provide circular, 360-degree viewpoints for onlookers.

Just as the raw material of clay is transformed through the processes of stoneware production, the defunct silo takes on a new utility, beauty, and value to the community through the act of painting.