Celebrate your favorite Midwestern traditions with us as we launch Harvest, a four-day festival October 3-6 featuring food and drink, live music, a petting zoo, and a large-scale community meal.

From the historic gardens to the contemporary galleries, you’ll be able to enjoy a range of offerings. Imagine food made by local chefs, wine, and cold beer outdoors—all while The Garden is at its fall peak. Big seasonal dahlias will be in full show, along with asters and sunflowers. You’ll see handwoven curtains of foliage with dried flowers from our campus. Tents and stages will be set up for musicians, performance artists, and a variety of harvest-themed acts.

Local vendors will offer incredible menus, tastings, and cooking and beer-making demonstrations. In fact, one of the Museum’s first restaurants, The Garden on the Green, was located where many of our culinary offerings will be. You’ll dine on festive fare where the Lilly family once entertained at Garden Terrace. This was no accident; we intend to restore the heritage of hospitality on this site. This is a central element of this new tradition.

Extending Newfields’ hospitality into the community, Seitu Jones, a Minneapolis-based social practice artist, will visit Indy to host a community meal for 300 residents of Riverside, Meridian-Kessler, Mapleton-Fall Creek, Butler-Tarkington, and Crown Hill. The project will bring people together, while illustrating the ways artists and institutions can collaborate to transform unjust urban food systems and improve the quality of life in Indiana.

If Spring Blooms is about resurgence, as we admire our campus coming back to life, then Harvest is a celebration of gratitude and abundance. You’ll see diverse, dynamic displays of seasonal produce. Our beautiful, curved neoclassical stairs will become a living cornucopia—a perfect place to take a photo.

We can safely say you’ll see more pumpkins at Harvest than you’ve seen anywhere else unless you grew up on a big pumpkin farm. We’re talking more than 5,000 prize-winning giant pumpkins, mini-pumpkins, blue pumpkins, huge crookneck squash, and different kinds of gourds. We’re working with mostly Indiana growers. Pumpkins abound inside the Museum as well, where you’ll be able to be immerse yourself in one of contemporary artist Yayoi Kusama’s hypnotic Infinity Mirror Rooms, All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins (2016).

7 THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT HARVEST While Mother Nature mixes up her favorite shades of red, orange, brown, and gold this fall, we’ll be decorating the Newfields campus with more than 5,000 pumpkins—even creating a pumpkin river and covered bridge. Here are some of the highlights of our first Harvest festival, October 3–6: Tickets to Harvest will be $5 for Newfields members. Children 5 and younger can enjoy the festival for free. To plan your Harvest adventure and get updates on the event, including participating chefs, restaurants, and breweries, visit discovernewfields.org/harvest.

• Catch the opening weekend of Infinitely Kusama. Think: Polkadot pumpkins, on endless repeat, in a room full of mirrors. It’s Indy’s most Instagrammable 45 seconds of the year.
• Watch local chefs create special dishes. Try the delicious flavors at each presentation and get culinary tips from the experts.
• Toast to an “Indiana Oktoberfest” in the Beer Garden. Fill your mini-beer stein with samples of seasonal brews and ciders, and visit the home-brewing tent to learn about the best techniques, equipment, and ingredients for making beer at home.
• Enjoy live music and cultural performances Thursday evening through Sunday evening. Bring a blanket or chair and watch a film on the lawn at sundown on Saturday.
• Turn the kids loose in the hay maze.
• We’ll also have a petting zoo and hands-on fun such as pumpkin painting and leaf printing.
• Shop local vendors for food and gift items like kettle corn and scented candles.
• Get inspiration for your own fall décor from stunning displays in The Garden, and talk to our horticulture experts