Big new public sculptures will relaunch art program at Newfields' Fairbanks Park
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A rooftop that appears to have dropped from the sky, a filigree house-like structure and a gazebo sculpture will soon enliven Newfields' Virginia B. Fairbanks Art and Nature Park. The large-scale pieces will arrive in June as part of a major ongoing refresh of the admission-free park, which sits just west of the Central Canal across from the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
The installations will reinvigorate the park's art program after years of environmental upgrades to the site, said Jonathan Wright, Ruth Lilly Director of The Garden and Fairbanks Park. The artworks also will offer new opportunities for interaction now that longtime favorite "Chop Stick" — a tree turned on its side to hold swings — has aged out and been removed.
A $3 million gift from Kent Hawryluk, a longtime patron and former trustee, will fund the new series as well as more art in the future. Newfields sees the relaunch as helping to attract more visitors.
"The sculpture garden is part of making (Newfields) a destination," President and CEO Colette Pierce Burnette said.
The art that will debut in June
The new works are part of a series called "Home Again" in a nod to the park's reinvigoration. They'll reside on and around the Hawryluk Sculpture Green, which is near the iconic "Funky Bones" on the open expanse of lawn around the woodland edge. The pieces include:
"Oracle of Intimation" by Heather Hart. Visitors will be able to climb on the roof-shaped installation by the Brooklyn-based artist, who is known for making sculptures that look like the tops of houses to give people different perspectives. Performances, workshops and community discussions will take place in and around the installation, which is a new commission tailored specifically for Fairbanks Park.
"This is Not a Refuge" by Anila Quayyum Agha. Displacement experienced by refugees around the world inspired the Indianapolis-based artist to create the white filigree structure that's shaped like a house. Visitors can sit on a bench and listen to recordings of immigrants and refugees living in Indianapolis sharing their stories.
"The Pollinator Pavilion" by Mark Dion and Dana Sherwood. The almost-22-foot tall gazebo will include paintings by Sherwood who, along with Dion, is based in the Catskills. Around the sculpture will be native pollinating flowers and hummingbird feeders that nod to the work Newfields has accomplished in its Pollinator Meadow.
All three fit the park's longtime aesthetic of outdoor sculptures that invite people to interact with them. Fairbanks Park opened in 2010 with eight large-scale artworks, combining art and nature in a plan that had been in the works since the 1990s.
"There are a number of things that kind of came and went," Wright said. "The original intent was that there be a mix of pieces in the park — things that could last for a decade or more and things that might come and go in a season."
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Key to the new art selection has been Lisa Freiman, whom Newfields engaged for the current project because of her history there and expertise, Burnette said. Freiman, formerly the institution's Fairbanks Park director and senior curator of contemporary art, is now an independent curator, arts consultant and faculty member at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Hawryluk's gift has been structured so that a cash influx propelled the initial art and $2.5 million went into an endowment to be used in perpetuity to support commissions, said Grace Meils, Newfields' vice president of advancement. The sculptures will be part of the Hawryluk Collection of Art in Nature.
Meils said plans are for new installations to be added to the park yearly, with larger commissions coming every few years. Among the future artworks will be a new play structure to replace "Chop Stick." Swedish architecture firm Visiondivision created the beloved swing set, which launched in 2012.
Newfields monitored the installation for safety over the years, knowing that its soft wood — carved from a native Indiana tulip tree — had a limited lifetime, Wright said. Newfields recently deinstalled the work.
Environmental upgrades paved the way
Recent upgrades around the park have set up the land to accommodate more large-scale artworks.
"We had quite a bit of work to do on the nature part — stabilizing the river, repairing damage that had been done to the site from construction," Wright said. "That pause in investing in and bringing big extraordinary works of art to the park was really because we were doing a lot of the infrastructure work that you don't see as much."
The 100 acres of land and water came about due to natural and human-made circumstances. The Huber, Hunt and Nichols construction company created a 35-acre lake by digging out sand and gravel to construct the nearby highway, according to "Newfields: A Place for Nature and the Arts," a book the museum published in 2017. The company donated the land to the museum in 1972 with the goal of developing a park.
The lake lies between two other waterways — a bend in the White River and Central Canal. Recent upgrades include building a multiuse path around the campus, removing invasive species and replanting native flora, improving the trail around the lake, creating the native pollinator meadow and installing a Pacers Bikeshare station.
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Newfields is currently working on adding parking in a sustainable way to an area where invasive species flourished after housing construction equipment during the highway project. The expansion, which is near the current parking, will include a porous material that will allow water to infiltrate and be cleaned, thus keeping runoff and contamination at bay, Wright said. The plan is to break ground this year.
A big celebration for the art is planned for June, and details will be forthcoming at discovernewfields.org.
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Contact IndyStar reporter Domenica Bongiovanni at 317-444-7339 or d.bongiovanni@indystar.com. Follow her on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter: @domenicareports.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Newfields will install new public art at Fairbanks Park in 2023
