A giant figure overlooking Locust Street in downtown Des Moines, Jaume Plensa’s Nomade has become an iconic symbol of the Pappajohn Sculpture Park. Visitors can enter the open embrace of Plensa’s figure, composed of a latticework of letters that both encloses space and allows light to permeate the sculpture’s interior. Looking at the jumble of letters, one feels an innate need to find words and meaning, as if the sculpture is a monumental word search—but no words appear. Plensa is fascinated by the symbolic potential of letters, explaining “They have an amazing memory and alone it seems like [they can accomplish] nothing, but mixing [them] together, they have this enormous capacity to do words, to do text, to do ideas.”(1) In Nomade, letters evoke the possibility of meaning without being informative or didactic. Additionally, the sculpture engages the history of decorative use of calligraphy common in East Asian and Islamic art, a kind of attention rarely afforded to the Latin alphabet in the west. Letters permeate Plensa’s practice. He has explored pasting letters on paper, on bodies, and onto magazines found in the streets of Japan. He often experiments with merging letters from different alphabets, creating sculptures in which Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, and Latin characters are linked together. This globalist worldview is also embedded in the movement of Nomade, named because it was slated for extensive travel prior to its completion; it was transported from the artist’s studio outside Barcelona to the Bastion Saint Jaume-Musée Picasso in Antibes, France then to Art Basel Miami Beach in Florida. Plensa is also a celebrated portraitist, so it is noteworthy that this sculpture (and others like it) are anonymous, faceless. This feature leaves the work open to multiple interpretations. The ambiguity allows Plensa’s Nomade to become a symbol of the wanderer, the traveler, the migrant, any nomad who finds themselves in the Pappajohn Sculpture Park in need of a warm embrace. 

(1) Transcription from recorded interview with Jill Featherstone, Director of Education, Des Moines Art Center, November 13, 2009. Curatorial files of the Des Moines Art Center.