- TODD VON KAMPEN North Platte Telegraph
They’ve survived 49 Nebraska summers and winters so far, challenging their viewers to mull the very definition of human art.
As the nation marks 250 years of independence in 2026, Nebraska’s abstract Bicentennial sculptures at Interstate 80 rest areas will turn 50.
They were to form a 10-piece, 450-mile-long sculpture garden in the middle of middle America’s coast-to-coast trunk route.
But two were never finished. One of the eight that were was removed after 35 years. Another, “Up/Over” near Ogallala, is temporarily inaccessible.
That leaves “Nebraskan Gateway,” between Maxwell and Brady, as the series’ temporary western anchor. The star remains “Erma’s Desire,” the flashpoint of six months of epic controversy that erupted in July 1975.
It centered on two questions: Are these sculptures “art”? And are they Nebraska?
The answers generated nationwide headlines — and respect that Nebraska pursued such an ambitious 200th birthday project.
Golden anniversary
Fifty years after the Great I-80 Sculpture Debate, a six-member “Commission to Preserve the I-80 Sculptures” is pushing to collectively list the remaining seven sculptures on the National Register of Historic Places.
Its ranks include Art Thompson, the Bicentennial project’s director, who saw the completed sculptures through to dedication and defended them when the statewide backlash struck.
“If we let that (anniversary) go by, we may have a problem later on,” said Thompson, the 82-year-old retired president of Lincoln’s Cooper Foundation.
Dan Worth, a Lincoln architect, said the nonprofit group needs about $45,000 — less than one-tenth the completed sculptures’ $500,000 cost — to assemble the documentation for a National Register nomination. The Nebraska State Historic Preservation Board, U.S. National Park Service and federal Interior Department all must sign off.
“I’m not anticipating we’re going to set off any controversy again,” said Worth, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln student in 1975.
“They’re so not controversial,” Thompson said. “I’m looking at them and thinking, ‘That made people mad?’”
He thought the same 50 years ago, too.
Nebraskans seemed impressed enough in August 1973, when Lincoln Chamber of Commerce member Thomas Yates presented the plan to the state’s Bicentennial commission with Norman Geske, longtime director of UNL’s Sheldon Museum of Art.
They wanted to provide “Nebraskans and visitors from other areas access to some of the best sculptures of our time outside of museum walls,” according to the project’s 1975 publicity materials.
The chosen sculptors would be part-time “artists in residence,” a feature the Lincoln Sunday Journal and Star hoped might “subtly refute the notion, particularly of some eastern sophisticates, that this is a cultural wasteland.”
Organizers targeted sites at 12 I-80 rest areas, with Ogallala initially tapped to host sculptures at both its eastbound and westbound rest areas.
Geske hired Thompson, assistant program director at the UNL Student Union, as day-to-day leader in September 1974. “It sounded interesting, so I said OK and set up my shop in the basement of the Sheldon Art Museum,” Thompson said.
A nationwide pool of 121 sculptors was pared to 46 finalists about that time. Organizers had $500,000 in hand from local cash and in-kind donations and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the federal and state Bicentennial commissions.
It seemed relatively few Nebraskans disliked the I-80 project, Thompson said. “We just hadn’t had that problem.”
Early tremors
But warning signs were flashing.
Some people were upset that only one Nebraskan, UNL art instructor Thomas Sheffield, had made the final cut. Gov. J.J. Exon publicly endorsed the sculptures but vetoed $150,000 for them in the state’s 1975-76 budget.
Thompson and the Nebraska Department of Roads presented models of some proposed sculptures May 29 at North Platte City Hall. Telegraph reporter Wayne Jacobsen reported mixed opinions.
“Some liked the sweeping arches and spires fashioned of steel and aluminum and the mammoth stone carvings,” he wrote, “while others thought they were ‘sick’ and likened them to piles of aircraft wreckage.”
When the final sculptors were announced July 9, there were only 10 instead of 12. Chappell had been dropped, and Ogallala would be limited to its westbound rest area.
None of the winners were from Nebraska.
And all planned abstract art.
One of the national Bicentennial committee’s three themes focused “on the third century of the United States.” Thus the I-80 sculpture project would feature “original contemporary sculptures,” its 1975 publicity packet said.
Line drawings of the sculptures were revealed the same day. Geske said he expected “geysers of controversy” over the choices, but “this is a good thing.”
“Volcanoes” might have been a more apt metaphor.
‘TOO FAR OUT!’
The rest of 1975, leaking into 1976, witnessed one of Nebraska’s longest, loudest debates on any subject.
Nebraskans stuffed their newspapers’ mailboxes, some of them supportive but many skeptical and more than a few consumed by sarcastic anger.
The World-Herald’s Public Pulse column “received one of the largest letters-to-the-editor responses in its history,” said a July 4, 2001, story on the sculptures’ 25th anniversary.
After three weeks of sculpture letters, “it’s time to give those concerned about city spending, abortion, detasselers, newspaper boys and a few other subjects a chance to air their views,” a Grand Island Independent editorial declared.
Many wanted more “representational” art. And after years of celebrating Nebraska’s Old West heritage, where were the covered wagons and cowboys?
“This is an agricultural area, and I just don’t see anything there,” Ralph Kapke of Milford wrote in the July 13 World-Herald.
Why not cowboys on horseback (they still exist), Indians and the farmer with his plow? They are who settled Nebraska,” added Mrs. John Hanks of Burwell in the July 19 Independent.
Most Grand Island-area letter writers took dead aim at “Erma’s Desire,” which apparently suffered from its pointed shafts and Maine sculptor John Raimondi’s choice of title.
“I may be ‘over the hill’ when it comes to modern art, but ‘Erma’s Desire,’ from the comments I’ve heard from the majority of John Q. Public, is TOO FAR OUT!” Emanuel Lukesh of Grand Island wrote in a July 19 letter.
Thompson doggedly spoke to any statewide group that would have him. But “I even had a good friend who lived in a small town outside Lincoln who came to a meeting and railed against the project,” he said 50 years later.
No love for ‘Erma’
Several opponents alleged the project wasted their tax money, leading Exon to remind Nebraskans that he had vetoed state dollars. About $105,000 of the money raised came from federal grants.
Complaining that the controversy had been “dumped” on them, the Hall County Board of Supervisors voted to deny “Erma’s Desire” a permit — even though it would go on state land.
The furor there didn’t start dying down until after Raimondi appeared Nov. 18 before county supervisors, statewide reporters and TV cameras.
He said “Erma’s Desire” was named for his mother, his family’s “aggressive hope” as he grew up in a ghetto on Boston’s east side.
“I searched who I am as an artist through my family and upbringing,” he told supervisors. “The sculpture is a monument to the pioneer spirit.”
The project still faced statewide hearings led by Grand Island state Sen. Ralph Kelly, empowered to investigate in July by the Legislature’s Executive Board.
But supporters had recovered from their shock. On Dec. 4 in North Platte, opponents were outnumbered by about 3-to-1 among 75 in attendance.
“I don’t pretend to fully understand the Scriptures,” one man said. “I don’t pretend to fully understand the future, either, but I think these should be part of it.”
On Dec. 5 in Scottsbluff, Mrs. Joe McClenahan of Gering called the sculptures “a slap in the face for Nebraska pioneers.” But Kimball Chamber of Commerce member Nate Eastman labeled them “the greatest advertising scheme ever dreamed up for Nebraska.”
Incomplete success
The controversy more or less ended on Jan. 14, 1976, when the Legislature voted 25-14 to join Exon in accepting the sculptures. Thompson and the sculptors moved into high gear to finish as many as possible in time for the Bicentennial Fourth of July.
Seven made the deadline: “Roadway Confluence” at Sidney; “Up/Over,” “Nebraskan Gateway” and “Erma’s Desire”; “Crossing the Plains” at York; “Arrival” between I-80’s Seward and Milford exits; and “Tribute to the American Bandshell” at South Bend.
They were dedicated in an east-to-west July 4 flying tour, led by Lt. Gov. Gerald Whelan because Exon was out of state. But Los Angeles sculptor George Baker and pieces of his “Nebraska Wind Sculpture” didn’t arrive in Kearney until July 8.
His floating Bicentennial creation in a westbound rest area pond was dedicated before hundreds Sept. 10. “It’s the most unusual of all the I-80 sculptures, and I think we deserve it,” said Kearney Sen. Ron Cope, who later joined Geske in helping to found Kearney’s Museum of Nebraska Art.
Still undone were Jerry Rothman’s “Seed of Nebraska,” which would have jutted high over Kimball’s eastbound rest area, and Steve Urry’s “Platte River Ribbon,” calling for an undulating arch at Cozad’s eastbound rest area.
They never would be. “A large part of the problem is that the Bicentennial is over and you can’t get anybody excited about it anymore,” Geske told the Lincoln Star in 1979.
Thompson blamed the investigation by Kelly, who died in 2005. “We pretty much had to stop fundraising for a year,” he said last week.
Still challenging
One cannot see all eight finished sculptures as they were in 1976.
Baker’s Kearney sculpture, too successful at floating, is restrained in its pond within a white fence that “doesn’t do it justice,” Thompson said.
The all-aluminum “Roadway Confluence,” meant to evoke the junction of the Union Pacific Railroad and Sidney-Deadwood trails, cracked within a year from exposure to stiff winds atop its hillside perch.
Repairs bought Hans Van de Bovenkamp’s sculpture 35 years. But further cracks forced its removal for safety reasons in 2011, said Nebraska Department of Transportation District 5 Engineer Doug Hoevet of Gering.
“Up/Over,” resembling a spinal-spiked dinosaur, can only be seen from I-80 for now. District 6 Engineer Cameron Craig of North Platte said NDOT is rebuilding the westbound Ogallala rest area and the nearby freeway’s last surviving original 1960s pavement this year and next.
Several artists’ notions of their own works, largely drowned out in 1975-76, survive for Nebraskans to ponder.
Padovano, laboring to finish “Nebraskan Gateway,” invited Telegraph readers on June 4, 1976, to “spend a half hour looking at it.” He chose its setting at the expansive westbound Brady rest area after studying site blueprints and the effects of sun and shadows.
“I’m trying to express the timelessness of this land,” Padovano said. “It goes beyond the 20th century.”
And though New York City artist Linda Howard stayed quiet during the controversy, Ogallala’s Keith County News captured her interpretation of “Up/Over” at its dedication.
“The most impressive aspect of western Nebraska is the awesome experience of the land, sky and space,” she said.
“The vertical wall sends your vision upward to interact with the sky. The modules then move back down to the ground to reaffirm the land. The arch frames the landscape and pulls your vision through to again interact with the land, sky and space.”
Urban 1970s America was amazed Nebraska’s sculptures ever became reality. Amid covering the controversy, the New York Times in March 1975 called them “the nation’s most considerable Bicentennial sculpture project.”
March 1975 called them “the nation’s most considerable Bicentennial sculpture project.”
And “the Cornhuskers,” it added, “will have something lasting for their bicentennial efforts, unlike most of us …”
