South Dakota Artist Turns Scrapyard Junk Into Amazing Landscape Art
John Lopez uses the landscape, wildlife, and history of his South Dakota home as inspiration for his sculptures.
During the time of Manifest Destiny and westward expansion, pioneers had to make do with their own grit, guts, and gumption to survive. The wilderness is a tough place to live, even under the best of circumstances.
It’s this sort of history that South Dakota artist John Lopez uses as inspiration for his beautiful and iconic work. John doesn’t use paint or ink to create his masterpieces. Instead, he scours scrapyards and farms for discarded equipment—but it’s what he creates from that metal that truly hearkens back to the roots of his ancestors’ Wild West.
The resulting works seem to have a life to them that other art just doesn’t possess.
Telling the story of life on the prairie is incomplete without the bison, the main resource of generations of Native peoples who called this region their home. The Grand River once knew vast herds of bison, unconfined by fences, as it now knows cattle and sheep that are moved from pasture to pasture by ranchers on horseback.
