After vandalism this spring, sculpture park enjoys season of support

As his peak tourism season closes, Wayne Porter has chosen to take the lemons of last spring and turn them into summer lemonade.

It’s true, he didn’t feel quite so cheerful last May when he arrived at his sculpture park west of Sioux Falls and found several of his creations vandalized. Since then, however, the outpouring of support he received in the aftermath and his own positive nature have overcome his initial dismay.

“I actually had a bit of a tourist bump,” Porter said. “And I was getting a lot of good Christians here who came to support me. So God works in mysterious ways.”

The support from people of faith was in response to the words “Jesus Christ!” and “Satan is defeated” that were spray-painted on a statue base. Porter pointed out at the time that none of his pieces had any satanic significance.

A four-piece sculpture titled The Guardians had each figure’s head cut off. While the heads have never been recovered, Porter found a substitute. The former rancher mounted the skull of a long-deceased Rambouillet sheep atop each Guardian as a replacement head.

“They’re not as big as the steel ones I made, but they’ll do just fine until I replace the steel,” Porter said.

No arrests have been made for the vandalism. Porter said the perpetrators were “people on a mission,” who brought ladders and power tools to use the decapitate the sculptures. They obviously had checked out the sculpture park previously, he said. In the months since the May 10 vandalism, Porter has added cameras near Interstate 90 and will install more every year.

Financially, there was a cost to the vandalism. A creative cost came with it. Porter has been unable to proceed with new sculptures at the pace he intended. He can’t draw, he said, so there are no sketches or doodles depicting what he wanted to create. Instead, the vision stays in his imagination until he can turn it into steel.

“I goofed off as a kid, hammering things out of steel and carving things out of wood,” Porter said. “I could have taught myself how to draw, but I never did. It would help me if I could draw. The images play around in my head. When one moves out, another comes back. I’m backlogged 200 years. I’ve got plenty of ideas to play with.”

One of his future projects will involve a 25-foot-tall “Alice in Wonderland” white rabbit. That theme is appropriate, Porter said. “I think of the universe, I think of falling into a rabbit hole, and it just gets ‘curiouser and curiouser,’” he said, quoting from the Lewis Carroll book about Alice’s fantastic adventures.

Construction of that statue and any others will have to wait until Porter returns to his home in St. Lawrence, 150 miles from his sculpture park. Work last winter was hampered by excessive cold and snow; he hopes this winter will be milder so he can get more done.

Porter can’t supply figures as to how many people have stopped at the sculpture park this year. It often gets so busy that he asks the tourists to make their own change when purchasing admission because he needs to be out directing traffic.

June and July are the busiest months. Tourism drops off after the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in early August, not that bikers make up much of his business.

“Bikers go from Point A to Point B, and hotels (in the Black Hills) are too high for regular tourists,” Porter said. “They wait until the bikes are gone, but then school starts, then baby boomers want everybody else off the road so they can go to the national parks in peace.”

It’s not unusual over the summer to have visitors from every state in the nation, Porter said. Last week, he hosted tourists from Mexico, while earlier in the summer visitors came from Austria and Spain. The most common home states for visitors are Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois and Iowa.

Some of his unexpected expenses this summer were offset by the generosity of people who had heard about the vandalism.

“They would tip me extra,” he said of the people of faith who came to the sculpture park to help restore his faith in humanity. “They came to the park just to help out. I meet a lot of really good people here. Most people are really good; it’s just a small percentage of people that have a sociopathic urge.”

Porter Sculpture Park will close for the season Oct. 15. Porter will spend the remainder of October preparing the park for winter, doing tasks like taking down the signs and storing the golf carts.

Overall, he said, it has been a good year. Sioux Falls is becoming more and more of an arts community, and people are willing to support even nontraditional visions of art. Museums and art galleries are like libraries in that the work they display won’t please everyone. That’s not the point, Porter said.

“Every book in a library might offend someone, but if you pull those books, pretty soon you might have books in there, but it’s not a library,” he said. “If you don’t like the art, tell your friends not to go. That’s what normal people do.”

Sculpture park owner discovers vandalized pieces in preparation for season opening