The Des Moines Art Center in Iowa has reached a settlement with Mary Miss more than nine months after the groundbreaking land artist filed a lawsuit to stop the institution from demolishing an installation the museum said has become too costly to repair.
In a surprise move, the DMAC and Miss agreed in court to release the details of settlement agreement, which are often kept secret. A copy of the settlement agreement provided by the Cultural Landscape Foundation, which had been aiding the artist in her efforts, shows Miss will be compensated $900,000 to drop her claims against the museum.
According to the agreement, DMAC will remove her land art piece Greenwood: Double Site in its entirety. Both sides agreed that the museum would have the authority on how it would be removed, including the possibility it might be disassembled in stages. The demolition had been paused amid her legal challenge but will promptly resume.
“The removal is subject to approval by the City of Des Moines, intended to begin as soon as practicable but may be impacted by seasonal weather, and that time is of the essence,” the settlement agreement states. Museum officials and authorities in Des Moines had contended that the installation posed a public health hazard in its current state.
Miss has pledged to donate her funds to a new Public Art Advocacy Fund established by the TCLF, which also advocated for outsider artist Allan Reiver’s Elizabeth Street Garden in New York, to “bring national attention to land-based works that are threatened and at-risk” like her own. Miss is the inaugural donor to the fund.
Mary Miss, Greenwood Pond: Double Site (1989–96). Photo: © Mary Miss, courtesy the Cultural Landscape Foundation.
The Art Center commissioned Greenwood Pond: Double Site in April 1994 and it opened in 1996. It boasts boardwalk paths that lead walkers up and down ramps around the edge of a small lagoon, flanked by various architectural elements, within a park owned by the city of Des Moines. Over the years, the boardwalk paths and other elements started to degrade.
The artist filed her lawsuit against the DMAC in April 2024 after the museum announced in October 2023 that it had suspended access to portions of the boardwalk and said it would conduct a structural review. It suggested then that some parts of the work could be dismantled, and notified her in December 2023 that it planned to tear down the work.
Miss and her advocates viewed the decision by the museum to remove the piece a violation of the 1994 contract that commissioned its creation and suggested that the museum had allowed it to fall into neglect. She argued that its destruction was prevented under the Visual Arts Rights Act of 1990.
In court documents, DMAC had argued that the installation was “battered by Iowa’s dramatic weather cycles, floods, rampant vandalism, and the wear and tear of everyday use” and that it had “diligently repaired and restored individual elements” over the years but that it would cost millions to fully restore.
The contract stipulated that the museum was prevented from altering, relocating, modifying or changing it without her written permission for a period of time that would extend past her death and that the museum would bear the brunt of its repairs, court documents show.
Mary Miss, Greenwood Pond: Double Site, Des Moines. Photo: Judith Eastburn, courtesy the Cultural Landscape Foundation.
Residents of the city also expressed support for the artist, who recounted to her their experiences with the beloved land art piece.
“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.
The artist thanked her legal team a Wandro Law Firm for their representation as well as the support of TCLF, stating “it would have been very difficult to surface this sculpture’s future for broad public inquiry” without their guidance. She said she was pleased to provide the inaugural donation to TCLF’s Public Art Advisory Fund.
“Site-specific works of art in the landscape, when starved of the necessary curatorial oversight and stewardship, like great works of landscape architecture, are among the most vulnerable and least forgiving representations of our shared cultural identity,” Charles A. Birnbaum, the president and chief executive of TCLF, 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.”