Artist Adam Frank’s digital mural of a bur oak, the state tree of Iowa, will add a touch of nature to the airport’s new terminal. Photo credit: Artist’s conceptual rendering
Writer: Michael Morain
Even while construction continues at the Des Moines International Airport, work crews are preparing for a handful of first-class arrivals. Five major works of public art are coming to the new $445 million terminal, set to open in early 2027.
The initiative started in 2023 with an $850,000 contribution from the airport authority, which enlisted the Greater Des Moines Public Art Foundation (GDMPAF) to commission the artwork and guide its installation.
The foundation hired Alexa McCarthy as its executive director that same year, so she had a short runway to get things off the ground. She has led other big art projects, at the Louvre in Paris as well as museums in Abu Dhabi and Shanghai, but nothing quite like this.
“It’s unique in that the art and the building were designed to work together,” she said.
Early on, GDMPAF decided to grow the airport authority’s initial contribution to a total of $4 million in order to expand the scope of the project. Within about nine months, more than 100 individual, corporate and foundation donors pitched in to complete the goal.
“This was the largest campaign the public art foundation has ever undertaken, by a long shot,” GDMPAF board president Bruce Hentschel said. “The outpouring of support from the community was just amazing.”
The financial boost prompted GDMPAF to solicit proposals from about 30 leading artists from across the country, and just over half responded. The foundation also posted an open call for Iowa artists to submit proposals for an exterior site near the main entrance.
Over the following months, GDMPAF narrowed down the stack of proposals to the five you’ll see for the first time on the following pages. Even the artists haven’t seen each other’s proposals until now.
The selection team chose artworks that are “distinctive, welcoming and culturally rich,” Hentschel said. The airport sees “a constant flow of people from all over the world, so we wanted art that would be engaging and easy to interpret quickly. Airports are busy. They can be chaotic, so we wanted something that’s peaceful and calming.”
The committee was drawn to several other concepts but eliminated anything that contrasted too sharply with the other works (like a big clock with visible inner workings), relied too heavily on technology (LED screens that displayed the sky in real time) or ran afoul of federal security restrictions (a water element above the baggage-handling system).
Now that the artworks have been chosen, GDMPAF is working with the artists, the airport authority, architects from HNTB in Kansas City and BNIM here in Des Moines, and the Weitz-Turner construction team to ensure the artwork is installed without a hitch.
“It’s been a really, really collaborative process,” said architect Rod Kruse, a principal at BNIM. “The art is going to be amazing. I’m so happy it’s going to be integrated into the overall design.”
Plans are also in the works to make the art as accessible as possible through school field trips, Braille guides and audio descriptions narrated by local students at the Oak Studio, a Best Buy Teen Tech Center at Mainframe Studios.
As the work continues, what excites McCarthy most isn’t the grand opening but the days that will come later, when a traveler might pause and look up. “That’s the moment I’m waiting for,” she said, “when I see someone really engage with the artwork and take it all in.”
Matt Niebuhr / The Art Studio at RDG Planning & Design, Color Sentinels; sentinels: metal with a high-performance paint finish with LED accent lighting; bus shelters: color printed vinyl applied to the back side of glass panels. Commissioned by the Greater Des Moines Public Art Foundation and the Des Moines Airport Authority. Photo credit: Artist’s conceptual rendering
At first glance, the bright yellow posts that local artist Matt Niebuhr and his team at the Art Studio at RDG Planning & Design dreamed up for the airport’s drop-off lane look urban. In a different setting, they could be traffic markers.
But they’re actually inspired by nature, specifically, Iowa’s official state flower, the wild rose. The plans call for a series of eight 9-foot steel posts, painted yellow on the outside and pink on the inner cutaway. The colors invert the flower’s stamen and surrounding petals.
“We thought, ‘How can we bring just a moment of cheer through color? How can we create a little moment there as you step out of your car?’” Niebuhr explained.
At the RDG studio south of downtown, the team painted a stack of tiles with slightly different hues to examine them in different light throughout the day. They didn’t want the pink to skew too red or too purple and call to mind the colors of Iowa State University or the University of Northern Iowa. The paints they finally chose “might look intensely bright on a bright, clear blue day and might have a softer glow when it’s cloudy,” Niebuhr said.
That’s the kind of subtlety he noticed more often when he returned to Iowa after a stint in Portland, Oregon. Out-of-staters tend to assume Iowa’s landscape is boring, but Iowans know how to spot its overlooked beauty — in the wildflowers that pop up by the road, the hills that roll toward the horizon, the clouds that drift overhead.
“Nature always finds a way to connect with you,” Niebuhr said.
In addition to the eight sentinels, the RDG team is designing four translucent murals for bus shelters along the airport’s sidewalk. Each image on vinyl magnifies a pattern in nature, like segments of snake grass or the spiral center of a purple coneflower.
This installation site is named for the Deb and Bob Pulver Foundation.
Anne Lindberg, viridis, custom printed glass with aluminum framework; painted wood and steel brackets. Commissioned by the Greater Des Moines Public Art Foundation and the Des Moines Airport Authority. Photo credit: Artist’s conceptual rendering
Anne Lindberg designed her panoramic glass murals above the airport’s ticketing counter and baggage claim to conjure the journey that happens in between. The horizontal stripes of subtle green, gray and graphite suggest the Iowa landscape and the limitless sky above it.
“It goes beyond your peripheral vision,” she said. “There’s a sense of a cloud, of upper and lower passages that suggest the horizon.”
In all, the two installations will comprise almost 200 panels that cover nearly 2,000 square feet. Her abstract digital drawings will be custom-printed on the back of durable Starphire glass that’s been ever-so-slightly etched for a satin finish that minimizes glare. The installation near the baggage claim weaves in with wooden slats, so some stripes of colored glass may appear to lift off the wall.
“It’s a passage of slow motion, and hopefully, it will offer a sense of calm,” she said.
Lindberg lives in New York’s Hudson Valley, but she grew up in Iowa City, where her father taught economic geography at the University of Iowa and her mother was a painter, silkscreen printmaker and sculptor. Around the dinner table, the family often discussed art, science and travel — themes that continue to influence her artwork. She still remembers when her dad brought a globe to the table to explain where they’d be traveling for one of his sabbaticals. “We’re up here,” he said, pointing to Iowa. “And we’re flying down here: to Australia.”
Some of her mother’s artwork is on display at the University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics, where they, too, offer a sense of calm. Lindberg’s own artwork is there, too. She’s designed grander commissions for the Richard Bolling Federal Building in Kansas City and the Citicorp Building in New York City.
But the new project in Des Moines is especially personal. “You come from the landscape,” she said. “And here, the landscape greets you and invites you in. An outsider becomes an insider.”
This installation site is named for the Ruan Foundation.
Adam Frank, VITAL DSM, printed glass panels, digital projectors, animation. Commissioned by the Greater Des Moines Public Art Foundation and the Des Moines Airport Authority. Photo credit: Artist’s conceptual rendering
The poet Joyce Kilmer famously doubted she’d ever see “a poem as lovely as a tree.” But a tree-sized double mural that seems to flutter in the breeze? Now that’s something else.
Adam Frank’s 30-foot renderings of a bur oak, the state tree of Iowa, will dominate both sides of the airport’s main elevator bay, visible from arrivals and departures alike. Each mural combines two layers: a still image, printed between two sheets of glass, and a video, projected from laser projectors on the ceiling. Both the printed and video images draw from a digital 3D model the artist compiled from thousands of photos of actual oak trees with bumpy bark and the bright green leaves of spring.
“The tree is sort of algorithmically designed,” Frank said. “You can say, ‘Hey, I want branches here. I want more leaves there.’” He programmed the animation in a similar way: “Let’s have the breeze blow from right to left, so the leaves and branches move in a certain way,” the artist said. He compared it to an animated movie, where designers might use computer-generated imagery to create a background forest.
At the airport, the layers of still and moving images will combine in a way “you’re not used to seeing,” Frank said.
“Your brain sort of mixes the two together, and you can’t tell which is which.”
But the overall effect, he hopes, is tranquil. “Traveling can be stressful. This is an attempt to create a universal symbol of health and life,” he said. “You don’t have to have any special knowledge about art or technology; it’s a tree blowing in the wind. A little kid or a grandma who doesn’t speak English, they can all get something out of this.”
Frank lives in Brooklyn, New York, and has created more than 20 public artworks across North America, including a smaller digital tree at a Pittsburgh hospital and a massive sculpture in Sacramento that looks like railroad tracks leading straight up toward the sky. Fun fact: He’s also developed a series of virtual pets.
He describes himself as a technologist as much as an artist and appreciates the opportunity to push both skill sets to the next level in Des Moines.
“This is something new in the world,” he said. “There is no other place on Earth that will have something like this, on this scale, using light and glass in this way.”
This installation site is named for Anastasia Polydoran in memory of Paul A. Polydoran, DDS.
Gordon Huether, The River, aluminum tubing and printed fabric. Commissioned by the Greater Des Moines Public Art Foundation and the Des Moines Airport Authority. Photo credit: Artist’s conceptual rendering
Hung from the rafters above the main concourse, Gordon Huether’s sculptural “river” will flow high above the foot traffic below — light, airy and full of movement.
It’s made from a custom-printed fabric his team stretches over curved aluminum tubing. When it’s installed, it will span the glass wall that divides the zones before and after the security screening. In that way, it offers a sense of calm and continuity in a space often defined by rush and fragmentation.
“The where drives the what,” Huether said over the phone from his home in Napa, California. “First you analyze the space, you observe it, and then you figure out how to tell the story of its culture or geography.”
He pointed out that Des Moines, like many cities, grew up along its rivers. So he chose that as a metaphor: At the airport, you go with the flow. The sculpture’s gently curving form in shades of green and blue will mimic the river itself, which airplane passengers can see from the sky.
Huether is using the same kind of proprietary materials and techniques he developed for one of his many installations at the airport in Salt Lake City. His team pulled fabric “like a pillowcase” over aluminum tubes that were formed in a specialized machine he helped develop. “You can put a straight aluminum tube in one end of the machine, and it comes out the other end however you told it to do digitally,” he said.
“That’s almost impossible to do by hand.”
He has produced hundreds of public art installations since founding his studio in 1987. His portfolio includes nearly two dozen commissions for airports across the country, including Kansas City and Houston.
Over the last few decades, he said, airports have evolved from utilitarian places designed to move people from one place to another, into “inspired spaces with beautiful architecture and great art and amenities.”
Airports, after all, should be uplifting. “You want that ‘Aha!’ moment,” he said. “Travel can be stressful even for the most seasoned traveler, so the idea here is to distract you from that stress and give you a little sense of awe and wonder.”
This installation site is named for the Thomas and Linda Koehn Foundation.
Alteronce Gumby, Home Before Dark, agates, glass, and acrylic on aluminum panels. Commissioned by the Greater Des Moines Public Art Foundation and the Des Moines Airport Authority. Photo credit: Artist’s conceptual rendering
On the surface, Alteronce Gumby’s sculptural 50-foot mural is a collage of iridescent stones and chunky shards of glass affixed to panels of painted aluminum. (See the example on the cover.)
But the ideas behind it go much deeper. The artist from Brooklyn, New York, sourced the artwork’s agates from Iowa and thought deeply — subterraneously — about their origins. Their swirling colors were forged by volcanoes that erupted and cooled eons before “Iowa” ever appeared on a map.
“I’ve always been interested in science,” he said. “I was the kid who did science experiments at home with baking soda and vinegar. I’m constantly experimenting.”
Over the years, his curiosity extended to art history and color theories developed by artists like Wassily Kandinsky, Josef Albers and Mark Rothko. He researched Isaac Newton’s experiments with prisms and the astronomers who discovered that stars emit different colors through various wavelengths of light.
Neil deGrasse Tyson’s documentary series “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey” marked a real turning point. “It opened up my imagination to all kinds of possibilities,” Gumby said. “If you were going to another planet in another solar system, with a different atmosphere, you might see a different kind of rainbow.”
And, really, isn’t an airplane ride a kind of odyssey?
“Going to new countries, discovering new cultures, new cuisines, making new friends — that’s one of the beautiful privileges of living in today’s times. The gift of aviation wasn’t something most people could do even 100 years ago,” he said. “The world is so big, and there’s so much to discover.”
Gumby’s artwork is in collections in museums and galleries all over that big world, including the Guggenheim, the Hirshhorn and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. He sees each piece as a vehicle for exploration, for transporting the viewer’s thoughts into new territory.
“Art has a way of doing that, just from looking at it,” he said. “It’s a way to teleport your imagination.”
This installation site is named for Wellabe.
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