When I first met Adam Grimm earlier this summer, he was a two-time winner of the Federal Duck Stamp Contest. Since then, he’s made it three, winning the 2024 contest with an amazing acrylic painting of spectacled eiders.

He’s among only a handful of artists in the world to claim at least three federal duck stamp victories. But even more incredible is that his daughter Madison is a three-time winner of the junior duck stamp contest.

I visited the Grimms at their studio in Wallace, a town of 91 people in Codington County. It’s about as far removed as you can get from Adam’s hometown of Elyria, Ohio, a western suburb of Cleveland. Ducks are much fewer and farther between there, but he still developed a love for waterfowl and hunting. He combined those passions with his talent for art and discovered the Federal Duck Stamp Contest, which dates back to 1934 and the passage of the Migratory Bird Hunting Stamp Act, which required hunters to purchase a $1 stamp before hunting waterfowl in order to help preserve the nation’s rapidly dwindling wetlands.

Artists were invited to design the stamp until 1949 when a contest opened to the public. The program raises about $40 million annually to conserve waterfowl habitat and, since its inception, has raised more than $1.2 billion to purchase more than 6 million acres of wetlands.

Grimm won his first duck stamp contest in 1999 with a painting of a mottled duck that came together rather unconventionally. Remember, there aren’t many ducks in northern Ohio, so a friend sent him a mottled duck that he had shot. “I would thaw the bird out the night before because I wanted that early morning lighting,” Grimm said. “First thing in the morning I would run outside with this dead duck and hold it up and stretch the wings out. Then I would run back in and try to capture the colors I had just seen.'

“I wonder how many of my parents’ neighbors were watching this crazy kid with a dead duck,” he laughed. “You do what you have to do in life, and there was no other way to do what I was planning on doing.”

Reference material became easier to find after Grimm, his wife, and daughter Madison moved to South Dakota in 2006. Not long after settling in their new home, they began to notice Madison’s interest in art. She wanted to do a painting like her father, so they entered her depiction of a canvasback into the Junior Duck Stamp Contest. At age 6, she became the youngest to ever win, and, like her father, has followed that with two more winning paintings.

You can read our full story on the Grimm family’s artistic success in the July/August 2024 issue of South Dakota Magazine, but suffice it say, we left their studio certain there must be something in the water around Wallace.

John Andrews is the editor of South Dakota Magazine, a bi-monthly publication that explores the people and places of our great state. For more information, visit www.southdakotamagazine. com.