The artist Mary Miss filed a lawsuit on Thursday against the Des Moines Art Center to halt the planned destruction of a work of land art the museum commissioned her to create less than 40 years ago.
The museum has said that the artwork, an environmental installation called “Greenwood Pond: Double Site” (1989-1996), has become a safety hazard and that repairing it is beyond the museum’s means. Demolition was slated to begin as early as Monday.
The Art Center said Thursday that it had no immediate comment on the lawsuit.
Miss’s legal action is the latest twist in an ongoing fight over the fate of “Greenwood Pond,” which has highlighted the difficulty of preserving ambitious public artworks — especially for smaller institutions operating in environments with changing weather conditions. In the weeks since the center’s plan became public, high-profile art-world figures including the collector Agnes Gund; the art critic Lucy Lippard; and the artists Laurie Anderson, Martin Puryear and Alice Aycock have written to the museum’s director, Kelly Baum, encouraging her to reconsider.
Miss’s lawsuit claims that the planned demolition of “Greenwood Pond” violates the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990, which empowers artists to protect their work from destruction if it is of “recognized stature.” The suit also contends that the museum violated its contract with the artist by failing to protect the work from the elements in the first place.
Miss has asked an Iowa federal court to issue a temporary restraining order to keep the museum from draining the pond and dismantling the installation; a hearing on her request is slated for Monday morning. “The project is an original work of art and cannot be found anywhere else on planet Earth,” the lawsuit states. “Its destruction is its extinction.”
Miss is part of a generation of female land artists who emerged in the 1960s and ’70s and are now receiving renewed scholarly attention for their contributions to a male-dominated movement. In the late 1980s, the Des Moines Art Center invited Miss, along with the artists Richard Serra and Bruce Nauman, to develop site-specific works for the city-owned park next to the nonprofit museum. Over seven years, Miss developed “Greenwood Pond: Double Site,” a collection of sloping walkways, sitting areas, huts and towers that encourage visitors to engage with the landscape from different perspectives. Serra’s and Nauman’s works, which the museum has pointed out were made from more durable material, remain.
The museum said in a statement on Wednesday that demolition was expected to take 12 to 15 weeks. It noted that over the years, it had spent nearly $1 million repairing Miss’s work, which had now “come to the end of its serviceable life.” On Thursday, a representative for the city would not comment on the lawsuit. Earlier this week, Connie Boesen, the mayor of Des Moines, said in a statement: “We prioritize the public safety of park patrons and respect the Des Moines Art Center’s decision.”
Miss said she resolved to take legal action after reading about the museum’s demolition plans on its website. “I don’t think anybody wants to go into a situation like this,” she said in a phone interview. “Getting involved with attorneys is the last possible solution, but I don’t think we had any other choice at this point.”
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