"Doubletalk on Double Site: Mary Miss has filed an injunction against the Des Moines Art Center to protect her work," Landscape Architecture Magazine, July 18, 2024.
Though women have been important contributors to the land art movement, their work has often gone underappreciated and underacknowledged. A court case against the Des Moines Art Center to protect one of Mary Miss’s major pieces, Greenwood Pond: Double Site, bears out how severely this blind spot could affect the legacy of an important sculptor who uses terrain as her material.
Commissioned in 1989 by Julia Brown Turrell, a well-known contemporary curator for the Des Moines Art Center, Miss conceived Greenwood Pond: Double Site as a demonstration wetland in the middle of Des Moines. The work was a commentary on the disappearance of wetlands throughout Iowa due to farmland drainage. Working with a community group and science center to plan the installation, she started building in 1994 and finished in 1996. A sloping wooden walkway slips down into the pond, traced along the shore by a gravel path with observation points and a pavilion that doubles as a shelter for ice skaters during winter months.
In December 2023, the Des Moines Art Center notified Miss of its plan to demolish the work. It had set aside $350,000 to drain the pond and remove its pavilion feature and distinctive arched boardwalk, replacing them with natural landscape and a walking path.
The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) called attention to the project’s deterioration as early as 2014, leading to a 2015 restoration. “It seems like the installation has had little or no maintenance for the better part of a decade,” says TCLF director Charles Birnbaum, FASLA. “They’ve been absentee landlords, and now they seem hell-bent on demolition.”
Following efforts to reach an understanding with Des Moines Art Center Director Kelly Baum, Miss filed a lawsuit in April to prevent the demolition. At a pretrial hearing, Baum, a former curator of contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, claimed she had been unaware of the piece prior to her arrival at the institution. (The Des Moines Art Center did not respond to requests for comment.)
That lack of cognizance matches the decade of neglect Double Site suffered after 2015. At that time, Miss had requested the center produce a maintenance manual—a common practice for managing cultural landscapes—to enable it to better steward the work. That never happened. By fall 2023, an engineer surveying its condition cited “significant structural concerns” and recommended closing public access.
