The long-running dispute over the fate of the artist Mary Miss’s Land art environment in Des Moines, Iowa, has been resolved after the artist and the Des Moines Art Center (DMAC) reached a settlement that will see Miss receive $900,000 and the institution proceed with the work’s demolition.
The settlement brings to a close Miss’s lawsuit, which she filed against DMAC in April 2024 to block it from demolishing Greenwood Pond: Double Site (1996), an outdoor art environment commissioned by the institution. The museum claimed that it had spent nearly $1m maintaining the work since it was unveiled. Even so, parts of the installation had been deemed dangerous and fenced off from the public since autumn 2023.
DMAC claimed it would need to spend at least $2.6m to stabilise and restore the work; Miss disputed this estimate. The lawsuit resulted in a legal stalemate, with Miss unable to force the museum to repair her work and the institution contractually blocked from demolishing it without Miss’s consent. Among other issues related to stewardship and outdoor-art preservation, the dispute revealed the limits of the Visual Artists Rights Act due to its narrow definition of art.
Mary Miss in her studio in New York City last year Photo: © Lila Barth
“The support of the citizens of Des Moines has been one of the most important aspects of this past year. I was made aware of decades of experiences at Double Site that were truly moving,” Miss said in a statement regarding the settlement. “I hope the resurrection and reconsideration of this project will lead to further reflections on the relationships between artists, environmental issues, communities and our public cultural institutions. I trust this experience can help to develop stronger bonds moving forward.”
Miss’s installation consists of a series of architectural and landscape interventions in and around a pond in Greenwood Park, a public park adjacent to the museum. Commissioned by DMAC, the installation includes a curving footpath, a pagoda-like structure, a boardwalk that appears to descend into the water and a sunken space that allows visitors to be at eye level with the surface of the pond.
Model for Greenwood Pond: Double Site, Des Moines, Iowa, 1996 Photo: © Mary Miss, courtesy The Cultural Landscape Foundation
Maxwell Anderson, the president of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation and former director of institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Art Gallery of Ontario, says that the settlement “isn’t an ideal outcome, but it is the best that could be achieved”. He adds: “The settlement should serve as a cautionary tale for future commissions of outdoor work, making it clear to institutions, corporations, government agencies and individuals that long-term preservation cannot be an afterthought.”
The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF), which advocated for the preservation of Miss’s work, is launching a Public Art Advocacy Fund to support the preservation campaigns of other threatened works, with an inaugural donation from Miss.
“Sadly, over roughly the past decade we have seen an increase in the number of threatened artworks,” Charles A. Birnbaum, TCLF’s president and chief executive, said in a statement. “What happened to Greenwood Pond: Double Site could have and should have been prevented, but the institution that commissioned the environmental sculpture for its permanent collection appears to have failed as a proper custodian and steward of this widely acclaimed and influential artwork, which is a core function and responsibility.”
