The Des Moines Art Center of the Iowa Museum of Contemporary Art and artist Mary Miss discussed the destruction of a piece titled ” Greenwood Pond: Double Venue She commissioned it in 1996.
After a year-long effort by the artist and the Washington, D.C. Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) to pressure the artist, the museum paid the artist $900,000 to move forward with the demolition work, ultimately reaching a settlement. The arts center raises enough funds to preserve the works.
Related articles
In the fall of 2024, the museum cited Miss’s physical and financial limitations as factors preventing the institution from saving it. Miss filed the lawsuit in April 2024, months after the Arts Center and its board of directors had internally explored options for funding the restoration work.
Ultimately, they found the $8 million in restoration and maintenance and future full-time staff oversight to be too expensive for the board to fund the project through private donations, said Kelly Baum, the center’s director. Baum said in a December 2023 email to Miss that the agency “does not and will never have the money to redo it.”
After launching a campaign to attract the support of art historians and former curators to advance the controversy, Mies claimed in a legal complaint filed in April that the museum breached a 1994 contract with her that stipulated that they planned to permanently Save this piece. The museum attributed the decision to remove the piece from its premises to public safety concerns. The center insists the sculptural installation, made of wooden components and built around outdoor elements of the museum grounds and surrounding lagoon, has faced “irreparable” damage over the years.
The following month, in early May, an Iowa judge issued a decision blocking the demolition Greenwood Pond: Double Venueleading to a deadlock between the artist and DMAC. The court ruled that the museum had no legal ability to remove the artwork without the artist’s consent and that the center was not financially responsible for restoring it to its original condition.
Restoration costs are estimated at approximately $2.6 million. The cost of removing the piece was estimated at about $350,000, which would cost the museum about $1.3 million, according to testimony provided by Baum at the legal hearing.
(As part of the settlement, Miss will donate some of the money to a newly created fund run by TCLF to fund threatened site-specific artworks.)
