Jason Woodside created “Gradient, Downwards” during a Principal residency in 2019, when he spray-painted geometric patterns onto three wooden panels. The Southern California native is represented locally by Moberg Gallery and has created artwork for museums, fashion houses and global brands like Adidas and Faberge.
Writer: Michael Morain
Photographer: Duane Tinkey
You don’t have to look hard to spot Principal Financial Group’s fingerprints on downtown Des Moines. If you stroll along the Principal Riverwalk to Principal Park and turn around, you’ll see the skyscraper that Principal built at 801 Grand. You can spot it from miles around.
What you can’t see, unless you’re a Principal employee: the company’s multimillion-dollar art collection. More than 500 works by the likes of Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Maya Lin fill the five-building headquarters, where employees pass them every day by the elevators, in the C-suite and just outside the cafeteria. Taken together, they form one of Iowa’s most impressive — and exclusive — stockpiles of art.
It’s rarely open to visitors, but dsm got a private tour and took our camera.
BASE COAT
Principal’s art story starts with its Art Deco building, the granite fortress at 711 High St. Since its completion, in 1939, its sculptural details and national recognition — Architectural Record’s “building of the decade” — signaled the company’s belief that a beautiful workplace elevates the work itself and enriches the broader community.
The formal art program took off in 1985, when then-CEO John Taylor directed the company to invest in artwork that could inspire employees and make the whole data-driven operation feel more human. As he put it, “Art encourages creativity, stirs things up … makes people think.”
During the art-market boom of the 1980s and ’90s, Principal accumulated hundreds of paintings, sculptures and mixed-media pieces by famous names and promising up-and-comers.
Highlights from this period include a Warhol print of a hot pink cow, a Haring print of the AIDS-era pink triangle and a major installation by Lin, who designed the somber Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the Washington Mall. Here, in her “Shift in the Stream,” trickles of water flow from the second and third stories of Principal’s “Z building” at 600 Seventh St. into a unified stream that cascades down a glass wall in the lobby.
Another major acquisition was James Turrell’s “Last Breath,” a dimly lit room with a glowing red hole in the wall. It was quite a departure from the old bronze plaques that honor trustees and top employees outside the original building’s auditorium.
For his print series “Silence = Death,” Keith Haring drew a crowd of his signature graffiti people around a pink triangle, which Nazis once used to identify and persecute gays and lesbians before it was reclaimed as a symbol of LGBTQ resistance. Haring created the work in 1989 to raise awareness and encourage compassionate activism during the AIDS crisis.
FRESH PAINT
After a while, the collecting slowed, then stopped. But when the 1939 building closed for renovations from 2015 to 2017, company leaders decided to rethink the purpose of the art collection. Some pieces sat in storage. Others hadn’t aged well, were no longer appropriate in a corporate setting, or simply didn’t fit with the renovation. Turrell’s “Last Breath” was removed, but Principal retained the rights to the concept.
By selling off about 250 works over the last decade, Principal has generated funds to reinvest in new art.
“It’s entirely self-sustaining,” said Lisa Coulson, senior vice president, chief human resources officer and the art program’s executive sponsor. “We’re able to invest in new works — many from emerging and global artists — thanks to the appreciation and strategic reinvestment of earlier acquisitions. It allows the collection to grow and evolve without using corporate funds.”
Over the past decade, employee volunteers known as “art champions” meet regularly to recommend pieces to buy, sell or display in rotation. They’ve expanded the collection’s scope to reflect the diversity of a company that now employs almost 20,000 people in 27 countries.
When international employees visit Des Moines, “they love to see images of home,” said Michele Minske, a paralegal and lead docent. “That’s important to the company as a whole.”
Walking the halls today, you can see German painter Daniel Rich’s tidy cityscape of Sao Paolo, and Ghanaian artist Derrick Ofosu Boateng’s “Lemon Joy,” a photo of a beaming West African man carrying bundles of lemons on a beach. On one of the skywalks you’ll find Argentine sculptor Elisa Insua’s “Financial Volatility,” an assemblage of hundreds of toys and trinkets that suggest the spiky graph of a stock market — a familiar image at Principal.
Argentine artist Elisa Insua earned a degree in business and economics before she focused her career on art. For her 2022 work “Financial Volatility,” about 4 feet tall and 7 across, she assembled hundreds of discarded toys and trinkets to evoke the spiky graph of the stock market. Insua is represented by MTArt Agency in London, and a lot of her artwork explores themes of capitalism and consumption.
Another fitting piece is a jumbo globe that Omaha artist Bart Vargas made out of discarded computer keyboards. The keys face up and down on opposite sides of the Equator. Some are a little grimy. “You can tell someone was eating their lunch,” Minske said.
Other artworks refer to office life, too, like Ames artist Tibi Chelcea’s embroidered circuit boards and Robert Longo’s famous 1980s portraits of sharply dressed men and women in contorted poses. (He pelted the models with unseen tennis balls.)
Of all the artwork in the collection, only a few nod directly to actual work. Most pieces are meant to interrupt the routine, even for just a moment or a second look.
The Taylor Gallery, named for the former CEO, showcases temporary exhibits around various themes. Recent shows featured art by women during Women’s History Month and art by Principal employees.
The Taylor Art Gallery honors former CEO John Taylor, who started Principal’s formal art collection in 1985. The gallery features temporary shows by Principal employees and regional artists, often organized around timely themes. The artwork pictured here was on loan from Olson-Larsen Galleries in West Des Moines.
A dozen employees serve as volunteer docents who study the collection and lead tours, gallery talks and other employee events.
Last fall Principal partnered with the Greater Des Moines Public Art Foundation to commission Dutch artist Leon Keer to paint a mural on a parking ramp at 901 Grand Ave. During a weeklong blitz this coming May, Principal plans to host five artists to create new artwork for the collection: local printmakers Allison and Jonathan Metzger, mixed-media artist Lee Emma Running of Omaha, paper artist Allison Svoboda of Chicago, and sculptor Susan Chrysler White of Iowa City.
“Art is a recruiting tool,” said Bruce Hentschel, a retired Principal vice president who serves on the public art foundation’s board. “Principal is doing its part to make Des Moines more vibrant.”
For now, the only way to see most of this art is to work at Principal or to be invited inside. The collection isn’t meant to impress the public. It’s meant to live with the people who pass it every day, to influence their rhythms and routines. In a company built around numbers, the art adds something that’s harder to quantify: a sense of curiosity, a way to resist the rush and make the place feel more alive.
The oil painting “In the Bubble” is the work of Pablo Fernandez Jr. The son of a noted landscape painter, Fernandez entered Cuba’s San Alejandro National Academy of Fine Arts at age 15, joined the faculty at 21 and now lives in Miami, where he creates hyperrealistic portraits for museums and art fairs across North America and Europe.
John Buck’s massive bronze “Companion” anchors a corner of the Principal skywalk. The Ames native’s artwork belongs in major collections across the country, along with artwork by his wife, Deborah Butterfield. One of her driftwood-style horses is at Principal; two more graze at the Pappajohn Sculpture Park.
Principal commissioned Dutch artist Max Zorn to create a pair of works to honor the company’s history. “Flashback” depicts the 1940s, with a car colored green to match the brand of Bankers Life (the company’s former name) and a license plate coded 77 (Polk County) and 711 (the address on High Street). In its 1990s companion, “Modern,” the car is Principal blue, and 801 Grand towers in the background. Zorn made both pieces with layers of colored translucent tape, backlit in custom-built frames.
The Los Angeles artist Richard Pettibone, who died in 2024, made a name for himself by painting miniature tributes to famous pop artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. In “Andy Warhol, 32 Cans of Campbell’s Soup, 1962,” he recreated Warhol’s mass-produced soup cans, essentially copying the copies in a way that deliberately blurs the line between homage and appropriation.
Italian artist Giorgio Tentolini reimagines classical sculpture in subtly painted layers of wire mesh (see close-up, above). The title of this work 4-foot square work, “Endiadi,” translates literally to “one through two,” suggesting a single idea expressed through two others: body and memory, identity and anonymity, past and present.
