Storm Lake lighthouse trail turns public art into city identity

Seven-foot fiberglass lighthouses now mark City Hall, public schools, the library and the lakefront, turning Storm Lake’s public-art project into a visible claim about who the city is. What began with two local art teachers, Jess Huss and Libby Whyte, has grown into a trail of sculptures that the city now folds into its City Beautiful identity.

From art teachers’ idea to city symbol

The Lighthouse Project started taking shape in early 2020, when Huss and Whyte pushed the idea forward from the Storm Lake High School art scene into the public realm. By 2021, the city had commissioned the first 10 molded fiberglass lighthouses, each seven feet tall, and the first round was in place by May of that year for a ribbon cutting at City Hall.

That early rollout matters because it shows the project was never meant to be a single installation. The city says public art is a priority in Storm Lake, and the lighthouse program was built to keep adding new pieces over time. Future lighthouses are designed by local artists who compete for the chance to paint one in their own style, which gives the project both a civic function and a local creative competition.

The city’s official lighthouse page says the sculptures celebrate what makes it wonderful to live in Storm Lake. That idea has become the frame for the project: not just decoration, but a public statement about place, pride and the lakefront identity that defines the community.

Where the trail runs

The lighthouses are not confined to one park or one block. They are installed in parks and other public places across Storm Lake, which makes the trail feel less like a formal museum route and more like something woven into daily life. You can encounter them near civic buildings, school grounds, recreation areas and places where people already gather.

A practical starting point is City Hall, where the first 10 were recognized in 2021. From there, the project expands outward into spaces that already carry meaning for the city:

• Storm Lake public schools, where four Phase II blank lighthouses were placed
• Storm Lake Public Library, where one design was displayed before its permanent placement near the library as part of Harmony Gardens
• Highway 71, where one of the city’s larger signature lighthouses stands as a roadside landmark
• Scout Park near Buena Vista University, another of the city’s signature lighthouse sites
• Awaysis Beach, where a climbable lighthouse gives visitors views and a photo stop over the lake

That mix of civic, educational and recreational locations is part of the point. Students see the project at school, library visitors pass it in a landscaped public space, and lakefront visitors meet it as part of a day by the water.

How Storm Lake uses the lighthouses to tell its story

Storm Lake has not treated the lighthouse trail as a one-off art project. It has become part of the city’s broader branding, especially under the City Beautiful label. The image works because it ties the town to its most obvious natural feature, the lake itself, while giving the city a repeated visual symbol that can be used in visitor promotion and public programming.

The city’s visitor materials connect the lighthouse project to a larger Storm Lake experience that includes Sunrise Campground, Sunrise Cottages, King’s Pointe Waterpark Resort, the lake trail system, parks and beaches, annual events and other recreational amenities. In practice, that means the lighthouses are positioned not as an isolated art attraction, but as part of a full lake-town itinerary.

The project also has shown that it can move beyond city branding into organized community programming. In 2025, Witter Gallery staged a Lighthouse Art Walk sponsored by Central Bank, with a route that ran from Sunset Campground to the Living Heritage Tree Museum in Sunset Park. That walk turned the public-art pieces into a defined path, giving residents and visitors a way to experience the sculptures as a connected set rather than scattered objects.

Why the trail has become part of local identity

The strength of the lighthouse trail is that it lives where Storm Lake already lives: at the school, the library, the beach, the campground and the city’s lakefront gathering places. Because the sculptures sit in public spaces and keep expanding through new artists and new placements, they can be revisited in every season and folded into ordinary routines.

Libby Whyte put the reaction to the first wave simply: “It’s better than I imagined,” after the colorful lighthouses were placed around town and City Hall marked the project’s first full public moment. That response fits the way the project has matured. It began as an idea from two art teachers, but it now reads as a citywide visual language, one that helps Storm Lake present itself not just as a place with water at its edge, but as a community that has decided to turn that waterline into public identity.