Native Sun News Today: Artist honors Native nations with 'Dignity'

Friday, May 3, 2019  

STURGIS— When Dale Lamphere was four years old, his mind took a snapshot. Prescient light from a window played across the face of a pile of clay, and “my mind got absolutely riveted to that.” Almost seventy years have passed, but the snapshot remains as vivid as yesterday for Dale, whenever he recalls the first thing he ever created with his hands, a lizard of clay.

Cigarette smoking was still big back in those days, which is why all the other kids made an ashtray. A lizard is nothing like an ashtray, and so it seems obvious that the definitive difference between Dale Lamphere and all those other ashtray making kids, is that he lives in a world where clay becomes something cool, like a lizard. But that is not the definitive difference— had Dale Lamphere been forced to make an ashtray, it would have probably been a lizard ashtray, of which all the other kids would have taken a mental snapshot, and remembered almost seventy years later.

Many of us have an idea in our mind, and however successful we are at actualizing that idea, the actualization falls short of the scope and perfection of the conception. But Dale’s ideas are just the spark for creating something others will find far more amazing and impressive than what he first envisioned. The key to understanding Dale as a man, and as an artist, is understanding why that is, and how he does it.

“A real creator let’s go of their own ego,” Dale says. “I am just right up against the limits of what I know I can do, and I am just opening myself up to the universe and pleading for help. Because it’s so important that it turn out right, that it have a presence and a life of its own.”

Those words, if coming from an Avant garde sculptor, channeling bogus spiritual vibrations from New Age crystals, would strike the ear as hoity-toity posturing, but coming from lunch-bucket Dale Lamphere, who grew up on a ranch near Sturgis putting up hay and mending fence line, they resonate with a simple, down-to-earth honesty.

“All I can do is poor my heart into it and do my best that I can do,” Dale says. “I feel like I am letting energy come through me, it’s not coming from me. I give myself over to the piece, and it’s important that it get done and done right, but it doesn’t matter who does it. In the middle Ages, artists didn’t sign their work, it was just who could make it manifest.”

When Dale talks Old School, he’s not talking chuck wagons and cattle drives, although he would have certainly held his own in such a reality; he’s talking about artistic geniuses a thousand years dead, who created magnificent works from nothing but their imagination and resilient resolve.

Whatever other artistic contributions he has made to the world of art, and he has completed more than fifty major commissioned sculptures all across the country, enough to earn induction in 1987 to the South Dakota Hall of Fame, enough to be declared South Dakota Artist Laureate in 2015, there is one contribution that stands out among all the others. “A fella named Norm McKie got ahold of me,” Dale says. “He wanted to do something that would honor the Native nations that we have here, and he wanted it to be female and he wanted it to be big, and that was all he said.”

From that, Dignity was born.

Heading east along Interstate 90, the road drops dramatically down into the Missouri River valley at Chamberlain. It does not seem like anything conceived by the imagination of Man, or wrought by his hands, could enhance the natural beauty of such a great river, but in September, 2016, a towering sculpture of gleaming metal was unveiled, the product of two years of hard work and creative genius, and she was named “Dignity.”

“When Norm McKie first came to me,” Dale says, “and asked if I would be interested in doing this, my first thought was, no, I don’t want to go down that road, it’s just fraught with all kinds of problems. But as I began to draw, and think about it, then I got excited, and pretty soon I said, yes, I can do this. People always have a budget in mind, and I’ve learned it may initially sound ample, but it seldom is. But I just keep going, and sometimes it turns out economically viable for me, and other times, it doesn’t, and I’ve learned over time to take the challenge and do it, and it all kind of balances out in the end.”

Dignity’s future location factored fundamentally into the making of her.

“I wanted her to integrate into the environment,” Dale says. “I wanted the wind to pass through her, I wanted sunlight to come through her, offsetting the diamonds in the quilt. Well, that happened, but I really wanted her to feel like a part of the environment, and the colors I picked are so they would work with the sky, I wanted it to have that integrated presence.”

Dignity is fifty feet tall. Her moccasins are eight feet long. Her handsome head is set in such a way she is looking out at some arresting aspect of the world, or contemplating the entire breadth of the horizon. Her spirit is imperious and humble at the same time. Maybe she is looking at you, or looking at the road traveled behind you. It would take an extremely rigid mind, and atrophied spirit, to drive past such a woman and not surrender your attention to her presence.

At just the right time of day, when the sunlight is beaming through her, and the prairie wind seems to ripple through her quilt and dress of flowing metal, Dignity radiates with organic life, and the river must feel both love and envy for her, because she routinely steals the river’s thunder.

Dignity is more than Dale Lamphere’s vision made manifest, because given the simple sketch he first did of her, he says “she far exceeded” not only that initial sketch, but any subsequent mental pictures of the sculpture to be. He used three different models for her features, ranging from late middle age to teenager, to give Dignity a signature face, no known person on earth shares. It took sixty separate sections welded together to make Dignity’s face.

James Giago Davies is an enrolled member of the Oglala Lakota tribe. He can be reached at skindiesel@msn.com

Copyright permission Native Sun News Today