Iowa Museum to Dismantle Mary Miss Land Art Piece Amid ‘Severe Decay,’ Drawing Scrutiny

The Des Moines Art Center in Iowa plans to dismantle a 1994 installation by artist Mary Miss that it commissioned after an internal review concluded that the work is now “unsafe to remain open to the public” and “no longer salvageable” after years of structural decay.

In a letter dated January 17, addressed to Miss and reviewed by ARTnews, the museum’s board expressed regret over the decision to deaccession the 30-year-old piece, claiming that alternative measures to keep the work’s materials intact were “not financially feasible.”

In an email to Miss shared with ARTnews, the museum’s director, Kelly Baum, said the projected cost to rebuild the work would be around $2.6 million, according to structural engineers who surveyed the work. Her letter added that it would not be possible for the institution to raise the necessary funds to save the work but did not specify if it had already attempted to do so.

Miss is a a key figure of Land art and one of the few women associated with the movement. The piece, titled Greenwood Pond: Double Site, surrounds a body of water situated on a public public park behind the museum. Comprised primarily of wood parts, Baum said the work’s elements are now suffering “severe decay.”

“Public art commissions are partnerships, and their success requires constant review and dialogue between each stakeholder,” a statement attributed to the Des Moines Art Center and its board of trustees reads in part. “The Art Center takes its responsibilities to its partners very seriously, and in the last several months, it has been engaged in frequent conversations with Mary Miss and the City [of Des Moines]—building on many years of dialogue. Regrettably, for a variety of well-researched and long-documented reasons—principally those concerning structural integrity and public safety, all related to the original choice of materials, their proximity to and/or immersion in water, and their exposure to the harsh Iowa weather—the Art Center finds it necessary to remove Greenwood Pond: Double Site from its current location in Greenwood Park.”

Miss did not immediately respond to ARTnews’s request for comment on her work’s planned deinstallation.

The museum, which has a significant collection of modern and contemporary art, first notified Miss of moves to address the work’s deterioration in October and conveyed to the artist that the center would need to restrict public access to it over safety concerns, a move the museum made public that month. On December 1, Baum notified Miss privately of the center’s decision to dismantle the work in its entirety after discussing options to preserve it with the museum’s board of trustees, according to internal emails reviewed by ARTnews.

Leigh Arnold, a curator at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas who recently organized an exhibition there looking at the women of Land art, criticized the board’s decision to destroy Miss’s project, emphasizing its significance to the artist’s career. In a statement first provided to the Washington, D.C.–based advocacy group The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF), Arnold raised concerns about the decision’s implications for gender parity in museum collections. In her statement, Arnold argues that the decision to destroy Miss’s work “while leaving commissioned pieces by male artists untouched,” reflects the art world’s “persistent sexism.”

In the January 17 statement, the museum’s board of trustees attributed the deinstallation to safety concerns, adding that a 1990 contract with the city of Des Moines stipulates that the changing conditions on public land allows the city to remove the work from its current location. A separate contract between Miss and the museum around the work’s installation was issued in 1994.

“The reasonable maintenance the Art Center has been providing for decades is no longer possible,” the board’s letter reads, which also noted a conservation effort in 2015. In her letter, Baum also noted that the wood originally used in the work had already exceed its expected lifetime of 10 to 12 years. Rebuilding Greenwood Pond, whether using a more durable wood, would also be financially impractical due to the project costs, according to the board’s letter, as it far exceeds the original cost to fabricate the work 30 years ago.

The move to decommission the work is one of the biggest made by Baum in her short tenure. She became the center’s director last February, the year she has served as the center’s new director after working as a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for eight years. Baum succeeded longtime director Jeff Fleming, who initially oversaw the installation of the Miss commission.