Art in the Park
The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park presents contemporary sculptures, exhibitions, and programs that encourage guests to connect with nature and consider their relationship with the environment. The artworks you'll find in the park are designed specifically for the space, and to encourage playful interaction.
Children can climb on Atelier Van Lieshout’s Funky Bones. Visitors are invited to relax or search for all 15 of Jeppe Hein’s bright yellow “social benches” comprising Bench Around the Lake. Or play basketball on an internationally scaled court with red and blue arches visualizing the bouncing balls of an opposing team in Los Carpinteros' surrealist and iconic Free Basket.
Alternately, Alfredo Jaar’s Park of the Laments is designed to be fully immersive and transform viewers' spatial experience as they transition through a liminal space—a concrete tunnel—and then walk through a stepped area filled with native plantings. From a central stairwell, visitors walk up into a park within the larger park, a space to quietly reflect, meditate, and recharge.
Home Again - Open Now
The Hawryluk Sculpture Green in The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park
Open daily from dawn to dusk / Tickets are not required to visit The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park
Welcome home! The long-awaited exhibition Home Again features three new sculptures in the park centered around the notion of home and shelter. Brooklyn-based artist Heather Hart’s canary yellow interactive rooftop Oracle of Intimation appears as if it has fallen from the sky. Climb through the windows, make the roof your stage, and catch spontaneous and planned performances, workshops, and community discussions on and near the sculpture.
Art and nature collide in the Pollinator Pavilion by New York-based artists Mark Dion and Dana Sherwood. The colorful gazebo is designed for humans, birds, and insects alike to slow down and become part of nature.
Pakistan-born, Indianapolis-based artist Anila Quayyum Agha’s beautiful and contemplative white filigree house-shaped structure features Agha’s signature laser-etched floral patterning inspired by Islamic art and architecture. This is NOT a Refuge illustrates the hope, humor, challenges, and heartbreaks of dozens of refugees who are living in Indianapolis.
Home Again is the first major activation in The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park since it opened in 2010. It is the first installation of The Hawryluk Sculpture Green, a new series of outdoor public art installations in The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park, made possible by a $3 million gift by Kent Hawryluk, a longtime Newfields patron.
Now Open
Oracle of Intimation, Heather Hart
Part of the Home Again exhibition, debuting 2024, Oracle of Intimation is a new site-responsive and participatory installation by Brooklyn-based artist Heather Hart. The roof-shaped sculpture will sit in The Hawryluk Sculpture Green as if the house has been buried underground. Constructed with recycled wood from a black locust tree from The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park, Oracle of Intimation will entice visitors to walk on and through the sculpture and to activate it by plugging smartphones into a built-in speaker to amplify music, spoken word, or other sounds.
Pollinator Pavilion, Mark Dion and Dana Sherwood
Part of the Home Again exhibition, debuting 2024, Pollinator Pavilion (2020), an interactive and collaborative architectural sculpture by New York-based artists Mark Dion and Dana Sherwood. The ornate 21.5-foot-tall gazebo is surrounded with native pollinating flowers and hummingbird feeders and decorated with fanciful paintings by Sherwood. The pavilion, which is designed to attract birds, bees, moths, and other pollinators, enables visitors to slow down and become part of nature as they rest on a Victorian sofa where they can observe the ecological process of pollination and feeding. The installation will include plantings indigenous to Indianapolis, complementing the work Newfields has done through its Pollinator Meadow and other efforts to support pollinator populations and expand native species throughout The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park.
This is NOT a Refuge, Anila Quayyum Agha
Part of the Home Again exhibition, debuting 2024, This is NOT a Refuge (2018) by Pakistan-born, Indianapolis-based artist Anila Quayyum Agha reflects on the loss and displacement experienced by refugees from various regions of the world. With Agha’s signature laser-etched floral patterning inspired by Islamic art and architecture, the work is both perceptually soothing and conceptually challenging. Visitors may sit on a bench inside the white filigree house-shaped structure and listen to recordings of over a dozen immigrants and refugees living in Indianapolis. They share stories that provide hope or humor within cultural differences, while others illustrate the reality of living within a system where the cards are stacked against them. These experiences are woven into a looping bed of sounds, instruments, and voices, representing the millions of immigrants who have shared in the journey to safety and relocation.
Artwork on View
Bench Around the Lake, Jeppe Hein
Jeppe Hein envisioned the 15 vivid yellow benches as one enormous bench that emerges from the ground, twists, turns, and submerges again, forming a circuit around the park’s 35-acre lake and the bordering bank of the White River. The work challenges the assumption that benches are made for passive sitting. Instead they can be the inspiration for playfulness and joy. Colorful glimpses of the benches encourage visitors to explore less frequented areas of The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park and provide opportunities to slow down, rest, look, and listen.
Free Basket, Los Carpinteros
For the large-scale site-responsive sculpture Free Basket, the former collaborative Los Carpinteros, originally based in Havana, used the dimensions of an international basketball court to create a massive surreal participatory sculpture. Free Basket juxtaposes the familiar and the imaginary, while offering the community an unlikely place to play. The soaring blue and red steel arcs suggest two opposing teams and approximate the invisible pathways of basketballs bouncing and flying through the air. In developing their project, Los Carpinteros referenced the rich history of basketball in the city of Indianapolis, creating an iconic, socially interactive venue that merges art, sports, and culture. Free Basket is Los Carpinteros’ first permanent public commission in the United States and was the first project in the park to be acquired permanently by Newfields.
Funky Bones, Atelier Van Lieshout
Funky Bones is a group of 20 white bone-shaped benches emblazoned with black drawings of bones that form an enormous stylized human skeleton. During visits to Indianapolis, Van Lieshout explored the wetlands and flood plain in which the park is situated. The skeleton appears in the meadow like an excavated archaeological specimen, relating to the artist’s interest in prehistory and relics as well as his other sculptural investigations of the human body. Believing that this project should have utility, he designed the benches as sites for resting, climbing, picnicking, and playing. Funky Bones is located in The Hawryluk Sculpture Green and has achieved worldwide recognition through its inclusion in Indianapolis author John Green's book The Fault in Our Stars.
Park of the Laments, Alfredo Jaar
Alfredo Jaar created a poetic new project, Park of the Laments, in the woodland area southeast of the lake. Known for a critical series of public interventions staged across the world, this is his first permanent one in the United States. It’s a square within a square, one rigid and made of limestone-filled Gabion baskets, the other soft and organic, made of indigenous trees, grass, and shrubs. Visitors enter the work through a cool, dark underground concrete tunnel. Moving towards the light ahead, they enter a tiered area filled with native plantings and a central set of stairs that lead them above ground into the center of the park. Simple wooden benches form another interior square where visitors can sit while they occupy this contemplative space. Jaar described Park of the Laments as a refuge, a place for lamentation and purging the global atrocities of the 20th and 21st centuries. Closed from Nov 1 - April 1.
Stratum Pier, Kendall Buster
Stratum Pier consists of a series of organically shaped and layered platforms at the water’s edge that provides a vantage point for observing the expansive 35-acre lake and woodlands. The design of the emerald green fiberglass and steel structure was developed based on a topographical map of the park; stacked organic, overlapping layers appear to extrude from the shoreline, suggesting the natural processes of erosion and layered growth. The project embraces its location in a floodway by allowing water to flow over the lower areas during heavy rains so that only the topmost section can be seen. Buster designed the sculpture so that it would transform with the ebb and flow of the White River, embracing the natural processes found throughout the park.
Team Building (Align), Type A
The New York-based artist duo Type A created the site-specific sculptural installation Team Building (Align). Consisting of two 30-foot-wide metal rings suspended from telephone poles, the sculpture is oriented so that the rings’ shadows slowly come into alignment throughout the year, culminating in a single unified ring during the summer solstice. The designated time of alignment as well as the size of the rings were determined by a team of Newfields staff members who worked with the artists over a two-year period on a real-time experiential art performance. From philosophical conversations about art and astronomy to physically rigorous challenge courses, Type A and the Newfields team collaborated to develop a sculptural form that could metaphorically convey the spirit and complexity of their shared collaboration. The project generated photographs, blogs, and videos that document the evolution of the final artwork.
Past Projects
Chop Stick, visiondivision
Eden II, Tea Mäkipää
FLOW: Can You See the River?, Mary Miss
Indianapolis Island, Andrea Zittel
NOTICE: A Flock of Signs, Kim Beck
