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Linn Skoglund Thygeson takes things apart in her paintings.

The Sioux Falls artist describes her style as deconstructed, where meaning shifts and interpretations become multifaceted.

You can see that in “Take Me to the River,” the cover piece for our 2025 Annual Report.

“It’s abstract, but it’s based on the falls,” Thygeson said of the work. “The pink and the orange are the granite, and the blue is the water. The white is the thinness of the water when it splashes over the falls.”

Step back, and you can see it – the steely grey and blue spill from the upper left side of the painting, pouring into the lower right side. The vibrant rust and watermelon colors pile up on the side, rocky like the quartzite supporting the water. To the right, a puffy cloud with the deep color of sunset.

“The pieces of the painting overlap, like a puzzle,” Thygeson said.

The constancy of the falls inspired Thygeson, who grew up near Salem.

“The falls have always been here. My relatives used to live near Unityville, and my grandmother’s father and her brother worked in the quarry in Sioux Falls,” Thygeson said. “On the weekend, they walked home, and that was 45 miles.”

She marvels at what that must have been like – taking work where you could get it, making your home where you could make it. And the space in between – hours of walking, thinking, wondering.

Her artist’s statement describes her approach to her work as establishing a link between reality and what is imagined. For Thygeson, this has always been how she thinks and visualizes.

“In my mind’s eye, this looks just like the falls,” she said.

Thygeson studied art in Minneapolis, Nebraska and the Sorbonne in Paris. She has worked as a photography instructor, art teacher and costume designer and was an award-winning graphic designer and illustrator for the San Francisco Chronicle. She moved back to Sioux Falls from California about five years ago.

“Even as a child, I wanted to be an artist,” she said. She’s always painted. Her best work happens when she lets it happen on the canvas, in real time. Her power is in observing, and in her work, which explores landscape, architecture and color.

Every year, the Community Foundation commissions an original piece of artwork to feature as the cover of the Annual Report as part of our commitment to support local art.

“Everyone sees things differently in a community. I might experience it one way, and you might experience it another,” said Andy Patterson, CEO of the Community Foundation. “We need our artists to show us yet another lens, another way to see, experience and understand where we live. That viewpoint helps us interpret our past and envision our future.”

For Thygeson, she deconstructed her deep love for Sioux Falls and Falls Park and put it back together through paint pouring down a canvas, sharp lines offering an industrial feel and the water cascading down the painting.

It’s a way of seeing – and speaking – through art, as she says in her artist’s statement:

“I can say with color, spontaneous scrawled lines and multilayers renderings things that I don’t have the words to express.”