Discarded Things Alive Again: The Maeck Sculpture Foundation Grand Opening and Tour

Your contribution today guarantees Decorah News is asking the questions tomorrow. Act now. BURR OAK, Iowa — In Burr Oak, Iowa, where the roads fold quietly through farm country and the horizon tends to belong to grain bins and church steeples, a sculpture park opened with almost no separation between art and ordinary life. People wandered in from pickup trucks and conversations. Someone talked about pizza ovens. Someone else asked about windmill blades. Children drifted through steel forms while neighbors carried coffee across wet grass. The artist, Steven Maeck, stood among it all, introducing not only the work, but the long accumulation of choices, salvaged materials, obsessions, losses and acts of endurance that made the park possible. The opening of The Maeck Sculpture Foundation did not feel like the unveiling of a polished institutional project. It felt more personal than that, and somehow stranger. The sculptures emerged from the landscape the way old machinery emerges from a Midwestern memory: weathered, useful once, transformed now into something symbolic and emotionally charged. Maeck's work does not disguise its origins. Wheels remain wheels. Steel retains the weight of industry. Grain bins stay recognizably agricultural. Yet nothing remains merely functional. Everything is reorganized into relationships of tension, motion, and, seemingly above all else, balance. That transformation is central to Maeck's philosophy as an artist. "I'm not interested in being a junkyard artist," he explained during the opening tour. "I'm a modern sculptor." The distinction matters to him. Salvaged steel is not the subject of the work. Instead: form is, rhythm is, spatial honesty is. Maeck repeatedly returned to the idea of "relationships" between forms, describing sculpture less as fabrication than as a process of discovering balance among disparate parts. The result is work that feels simultaneously industrial and lyrical, monumental and improvised. His path to sculpture was indirect and, by his own telling, economically disastrous. For twenty-five years, Maeck worked as an itinerant dealer in antiquarian rugs, driving across the eastern United States to set up temporary galleries in convention centers and exhibition halls. He spoke during the tour about learning visual arrangement through those years: how shifting an object "half an inch to the left or the right" could completely alter a composition's impact. He described hauling inventory thousands of miles at enormous expense, often barely turning a profit. One story lingered over the entire opening. After paying four thousand dollars for a booth at the Manhattan Modernism show in New York, Maeck sold only enough to cover the trip. Exhausted, he slept in his van at a New Jersey rest stop and woke up in tears. "And then realized I could stay home and lose money," he said, laughing softly at the memory. That realization became a turning point in his life. Encouraged by his wife Karleen, who grew up in the Decorah area, Maeck stopped chasing sales and committed fully to making sculpture. What followed was not a late hobby or retirement experiment, but a disciplined studio practice. He estimates he has produced roughly twenty sculptures a year for more than two decades. The park itself reflects that accumulation of labor. It is less a curated exhibition than an evolving ecosystem of thought. One sculpture, "Dragline Victory of Samothrace," references the ancient Greek Winged Victory of Samothrace at the Louvre while using steel excavator bucket components reshaped into sweeping, wing-like curves. Another, "Her Great Compassionate Heart," shifts dramatically depending on weather and light, something Maeck encouraged visitors to notice by physically repositioning themselves around the piece. His insistence that sculpture must work from multiple sides revealed a deeply formal concern with movement through space. "You can't put all sculpture against the wall," he said. "I think it's important for sculptures to have two sides." That philosophy becomes especially potent outdoors, where weather acts as a collaborator. Several kinetic works groan, creak, or move in wind and humidity. Others rely on changing sunlight. One attendee spoke passionately about a large-scale stained-glass installation Maeck created near Highway 52, where salvaged colored church windows ignite at precise moments when sunlight crests the hill. The work, now inaccessible after a property dispute, survives almost mythically through descriptions from locals who still watch for its flashes of color at certain hours. That piece may help explain why this sculpture park matters beyond its individual artworks. Maeck's vision is fundamentally environmental. He does not merely place sculptures outdoors. He composes interactions among steel, weather, topography, agriculture, memory, and movement. The grain bins converted into viewing and installation spaces are a perfect example. Rather than erase their agricultural identity, Maeck amplifies it. He spoke during the tour about the historical role of grain bins as symbols of debt, storage, labor, and survival in rural America. By repurposing them as sculptural environments, he transforms familiar farm infrastructure into contemplative architecture. Visitors move through layers of industrial history: deindustrialization, farming technology, salvage economies, immigrant labor, disappearing small towns, and the quiet reinvention of rural cultural life. Maeck himself referenced Sioux Falls as an example of how public art can become both civic identity and economic survival after industrial decline. His own work participates in that same conversation, though on a deeply personal scale. Even the titles of the sculptures reveal an artist pulling inspiration from literature, Buddhism, Renaissance painting, rock music lyrics, Native American history, and philosophy with equal seriousness. A sculpture inspired by Zen patriarch Bodhidharma stands near memorial references to Chief Joseph's brother Ollokot of the Nez Perce. Elsewhere are nods to Jackson Browne songs, medieval martyrdom imagery, and a D.H. Lawrence poem titled "Whales Weep Not." The park never feels academically overexplained, however. Maeck's intellectualism is grounded by material reality. He speaks about six-inch strip steel with the same reverence another artist might reserve for fine marble. One salvaged industrial fragment, left largely unaltered, fascinated him simply because it embodied "the magnitude of the reality of steel." That phrase may be one of the clearest windows into his artistic worldview. Maeck sees beauty not as decoration, but as intensified presence. Weight, rust, strain, balance, weathering and scale all remain visible. Nothing is hidden. The sculptures acknowledge labor and entropy while resisting despair. They are not polished monuments pretending permanence. They are arrangements holding themselves together in open dialogue with time and gravity. That openness extended to the atmosphere of the opening itself. The event unfolded less like a formal art-world gathering than a community wandering collectively through an artist's mind. Potters, farmers, tradespeople, neighbors, and regional artists moved freely among the work, trading stories about local projects and remembered installations. Maeck repeatedly credited local workers and collaborators, from tree crews to welders to farmers who donated structures and materials. The park therefore resists the isolated mythology of the solitary genius artist. Maeck may be the singular creative force, but the project is embedded in regional networks of labor, generosity and shared curiosity. Just before a brief tour of his home, Maeck pointed to a sign just outside of the door that read in kanji: "積ん読", pronounced "tsundoku", an affectionate Japanese term which translates to "procuring so many books, that one could not possibly read them all". One could be mistaken for not realizing that the sign genuinely served as a preemptive warning. Maeck's house was utterly filled with stacks of any and all kinds of books; hundreds and hundreds of different perspectives and diverse voices laid out side by side. Near the end of the opening, Maeck was asked whether his enormous collection of books and accumulated knowledge shaped the sculptures as expressions of collective consciousness. "A great deal of our individual consciousness is composed of information," he said. "The books that I've selected, I was also hoping that in many of them, there was wisdom." Then, in one final turn characteristic of both his seriousness and humor, he contrasted wisdom with artificial intelligence, arguing that processing information is not the same thing as knowing how to use it constructively—and really feeling its weight. The comment landed differently standing among his sculptures. Because what Maeck has built in Burr Oak is not simply an outdoor gallery. It is a physical argument for human discernment. For attention. For intuition shaped slowly over decades. For the possibility that discarded things, carefully arranged, can become emotionally alive again. Get the inside scoop! Subscribe to the free DecorahNews.com newsletter and receive local news, expert analysis, and stories that matter most—straight to your inbox.