Obama Sculpture With Daughter Turns Heads In South Dakota

RAPID CITY, SD — A bronze sculpture of former President Barack Obama and his daughter Sasha has joined others in the “City of Presidents,” a public art installation that covers several city blocks in the heart of downtown Rapid City. The Obama statue is one of 43 that have been commissioned since the first sculptures were installed 20 years ago.

The sculpture by South Dakota artist James Van Nuys, based on a photo taken at Obama’s first inauguration in 2009, was settled on after several false starts. One idea that made it into clay showed the 44th president waving as he walked on paving bricks with the names of leaders in human, civil and women’s rights movements.

It spoke to several of his legacies, “but it was boring,” said Dallerie Davis, the co-founder and artist liaison of the City of Presidents installation.

“The holy grail in sculpture is to have a statue that is interesting, not just a guy standing on the street corner waving,” Davis said. “One of us — I’m not sure if it was the artist or me — said ‘this does not have a wow factor and doesn’t make the cars slow down.’ ”

Several other concepts had been proposed, then rejected.

One that was given serious consideration was based on a photo of Obama sitting in the same Montgomery, Alabama, bus seat that Rosa Parks refused to give up for a white passenger in 1955. Her quiet revolution sparked similar actions in cities across the South, propelled Martin Luther King Jr. to the national spotlight as the acknowledged leader of the civil rights movement and led to a 1956 Supreme Court ruling banning segregation on public transportation.

As important as the Montgomery bus boycott was in American history and to Obama’s own rise to the presidency, a 2012 photo of him sitting in the bus seat at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, didn’t translate well into sculpture.

“We fooled around with it,” Davis said, “but we couldn’t figure out how to make that into a sculpture.”

After the clay model of Obama waving fell flat, Van Nuys came up with an idea.

“If you have a statue that is boring and put in a dog or child, you will have a very interesting statue,” Davis said. “We could have put in a Portuguese water dog or one of his daughters. We had plenty of ammunition to rescue this boring statue and decided on the daughter.”

When the sculpture was unveiled last week at an overflowing crowd at the Elks Theatre in Rapid City, “we listened for an audible ‘wow’ that comes from the audience,” Davis said.

“We not only got that audible ‘wow,’ but a standing ovation,” she said. “Typically, we unveil four a year, and now that we’ve had a hiatus of eight years, having just one on the stage, I think, lent to a bit of excitement.”

The Obama sculpture isn’t the only one in the installation that features presidents and their children. John F. Kennedy, the 35th president, is shown with his son, affectionately known during and after his presidency as “John-John.” Tad Lincoln is by the side of his father, Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president.

“It is very much a ‘wow’ statue with the charm of the little girl,” Davis said of the Obama sculpture. “I think no matter who you are, Republican or Democrat, you have to give credit to President Obama for being a family man. We don’t have that many presidents with that attribute. The one thing we could celebrate that everyone would understand would be that aspect of him being a family man.”

The installation doesn’t feature seated presidents. President Trump's sculpture will be added after he leaves office.

“We didn’t want any political favoritism or political agenda,” Davis said. “We really are about history and not about politics.”

All artists creating sculptures for the City of Presidents installation are from South Dakota. In addition to Van Nuys, other artists who have contributed are James Michael Maher, John Lopez, Edward Halavaka, and Lee Leuning and Sherri Trebby, who worked as a team.

The project is funded entirely with donations, and artists are paid $50,000 for each sculpture.

The City of Presidents installation gives tourists another reason to make the 20-mile drive from the Mount Rushmore National Monument, the granite landmark in the Badlands that shows 60-foot-tall faces of former presidents George Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson.

“Our logo is ‘from the mountain to Main Street,’ ” Davis said. “You can go to the mountain to see four former presidents, or you can come to Rapid City to see them all.”

The City of Presidents installation has been a spark for tourism in Rapid City.

“The entire town has come alive around this project, and several offshoots have come around it,” Davis said, ticking off a list of events, from a festival held at a courtyard in the middle of town, street closures on Thursday nights during the summer for bands and pop-up events that all play off a patriotic theme.

“There’s a lot of energy,” she said.

One of the sculptures in the City of Presidents is climbable, for chilren anyway, and it has local historic significance. Calvin Coolidge, the 30th president, who is shown in a big Stetson cowboy hat and boots, stands next to a saddle made especially for him by Rapid City saddle maker Bud Duhamel, whose family still resides in Rapid City and owns a local radio and television station.

And here’s a riddle that won’t stump people who know their history: If Obama was the nation’s 44th president, why is his sculpture the 43rd installed in the City of Presidents? The answer: Grover Cleveland is the only U.S. president to serve two non-consecutive terms, one from 1885-1889 and the other from 1893-1897.

“We thought about having two Grover Clevelands,” Davis said, “but decided one was enough.”

See all the City of Presidents sculptures on the Rapid City tourism website.