Fashion
Des Moines Art Center to Demolish Work and Pay Land Artist $900,000
The artist Mary Miss agreed to the settlement, ending a yearlong battle to save her work. The museum said her piece, which it had commissioned, had become a safety hazard.
A celebrated artwork by the environmental artist Mary Miss will be demolished by the museum that commissioned it.
On Tuesday, the Des Moines Art Center reached an agreement with Miss, 80, to dismantle her sprawling outdoor installation, “Greenwood Pond: Double Site,” in exchange for $900,000, ending the lawsuit she filed against the museum last April seeking to save it.
The Des Moines Art Center invited Miss in the late 1980s to develop a site-specific work for a city-owned park. In late 2023, the museum told her that the installation — a network of curving walkways, cantilevered bridges and seating areas designed to encourage visitors to interact with the landscape — had become a safety hazard and was at risk of collapse. Replacing the degraded materials would cost $2 million to $2.6 million, the museum said, a sum that it could not afford.
Getting rid of the work, it turns out, is also quite expensive. In addition to paying Miss, the Des Moines Art Center has estimated it will cost as much as $350,000 to dismantle “Greenwood Pond: Double Site,” according to notes from the testimony by the museum’s director, Kelly Baum. That would bring the total cost of the resolution to $1.25 million (without factoring in lawyers’ fees).
“The settlement will end a breach of contract lawsuit filed by Miss on April 4, 2024, and allow the Des Moines Art Center to proceed with previously stated plans to remove the artwork in its entirety,” the museum said in a statement.
In an interview, Miss described her feelings about the resolution as “complicated.”