Actress Mary Miss filed a case on Thursday against the Des Moines Art Center to stop the planned destruction of a work of land art that the museum commissioned him to create less than 40 years ago.
The museum said the artwork, an environmental installation called “Greenwood Pond: Double Place” (1989-1996), has become a safety hazard and its repair is beyond the museum’s ability. Demolition is scheduled to begin Monday.
The Art Center said Thursday it had no immediate comment on the lawsuit.
Miss’s legal action is the latest twist in an ongoing battle over the fate of “Greenwood Pond,” which has highlighted the difficulty of preserving ambitious public artworks — especially for smaller institutions operating in climate change environments. In the weeks since the center’s plan became public, high-profile art-world figures including collector Agnes Gund; art critic Lucy Lippard; and artists Laurie Anderson, Martin Puryear and Alice Aycock wrote to the museum’s director, Kelly Baum, urging him to reconsider.
Miss’s lawsuit claims that the planned demolition of “Greenwood Pond” violates the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990, which gives artists the power to protect their work from destruction if it is of “recognized stature.” The suit also contends that the museum breached its contract with the artist by failing to protect the work from the elements in the first place.
Miss asked the Iowa federal court to issue a temporary restraining order to prevent the museum from draining the pond and dismantling the installation; a hearing on his request is scheduled 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 artists Richard Serra and Bruce Nauman, to develop site-specific works for the city-owned park adjacent to the nonprofit museum . Over the course of 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. Works by Serra and Nauman remain, which the museum points out are made from stronger material.
The museum said in a statement Wednesday that demolition is expected to take 12 to 15 weeks. It noted that over the years, it has spent nearly $1 million refurbishing Miss’s work, which is now “coming to the end of its useful life.” On Thursday, a representative for the city would not comment on the case. Earlier this week, Connie Boesen, the mayor of Des Moines, said in a statement: “We put the public safety of park patrons first and respect the decision of the Des Moines Art Center.”
Miss said she decided to take legal action after reading about the museum’s demolition plans on its website. “I don’t think anyone wants to go into a situation like this,” he said in a phone interview. “Getting lawyers involved is the last possible solution, but I don’t think we have any other choice at this point.”