This Must be the Place: Newfields Takes the Domestic Outdoors With Home Again

Oracle of Intimation.

By EMMA RIVA July 19, 2024

Newfields was once Oldfields. The Lilly family referred to their lavish American County estate as “Oldfields.” The full grounds then became “Newfields” in 2017 as a rebranding campaign for the Lilly House, the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) and the Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park, where its 2024 Home Again public art debuted this June. Home Again is the first in a series of outdoor installations made possible by philanthropist Kent Hawryluk’s endowment to the museum. Home Again is a triple threat, three installations by Heather Hart (Brooklyn, NY), Anila Quayyum Agha (Indianapolis, IN), and duo Mark Dion and Dana Sherwood (Catskill, NY). The installation is a project of curator Lisa Freiman, who originally developed Virginia B. Fairbanks Park as part of the IMA. Home Again is her first new project in the public space in over a decade and further shows her vision for the public space’s relationship to the museum.

In the years following COVID closures, museums have had to re-evaluate—Christopher Bedford of SFMOMA called it a turn towards “radical hospitality.” To draw in more guests, the focus has to be making them feel welcome in the notoriously exclusionary “art world” and the daunting annals of art history. Almost every experience these days seems like it has a financial barrier around it, to the point of cruel irony. I had to find an archived version of the linked article about radical hospitality in museums because it was behind a paywall.

This is NOT a Refuge. 

I had the opportunity of seeing Home Again as part of a press trip to Newfields and noticed there’s an undercurrent in the exhibition about how to create art that the public can see and engage with in the fee-free zone of the museum. The Indianapolis Musuem of Art had free admission until 2007, then added a fee, then doubled-back, then added a fee again. But the Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park is always free and open to the public. A reality for arts organizations in the state of Indiana is that there is little-to-no government funding available, so though Home Again is public art, it had to be privately funded. (A guest casually walking in one of the installations informed me as much—this is apparently common knowledge among art aficionados in Indianapolis). Home Again’s existence highlights the importance of philanthropy to museums’ existence, and the level of public engagement with it should encourage further giving. The exhibition asks people that engage with it: Where do you feel welcome? What makes you feel at home? How can you share your home with others? 

Anila Quayyum Agha’s This is NOT a Refuge was my first stop at Home Again. It makes an intricate structure of white metal at the shore of one of the grounds’ small ponds. The delicate metalworking was meant to mirror art deco row houses, Agha recalled, but the swirls and curlicues of the design come from her own life. “I based the design of the piece off of a walnut wood Quran holder that my mother had in Lahore, where I grew up,” she said. This is NOT a Refuge, originally exhibited at the Kansas City biennale, also features an audio component of testimonies of immigrants that settled in Indianapolis. At the site, the podcast-like audio mixes with the natural soundscape of chirping birds around the pond and trees. There’s a metaphor in the fact that the voices of those that took flight to come to this country overlap with the bird calls.

The gaps in the metal allow for fragments of light to filter in, bringing to mind the Leonard Cohen quote: “There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” But you don’t want a crack in your roof if you’re trying to take refuge from the rain. Agha’s piece comments on the irony of things that proclaim to be welcoming refuges but really only pay lip service. “People need refuge, but if it’s exclusionary, it’s a mirage,” Agha said. “In our own city, we don’t have protections for homeless people or immigrants.”

If This is NOT a Refuge is a house with no roof, Heather Hart’s Oracle of Intimation is a roof with no house. The yellow rooftop perches on the grass and allows passers-by to crawl inside an attic space. The installation is part of a series Hart has been working on for 14 years of transient spaces. It reminded me of Shohei Katayama’s As Below, So Above at the Mattress Factory in 2023-2024, where the artist created a meditative cave in the museum’s basement with floorboard holes to let footsteps echo into it. Part of what brought to mind Katayama’s work, which had an intense limestone scent, was the strong smell of woodchips in the basement space. The attic and the basement are the places we might be afraid to go. “I see my work as being like ‘architectural quotes’ and part of a somatic experience,” Hart said. “An attic holds secrets. It’s a space of possibility.” Her architectural practice is influenced by her own life—her father was a carpenter, and she sees architecture as an “oral history” passed on from him.

Like Agha’s soundscape, Hart also uses audio elements, but hers have a twist. She included a speaker which guests can attach their phone to and play their own music. “A kid came in playing this really saccharine children’s music. I didn’t pick it, but why not? So many people are intimidated by art in a way that invalidates them. There’s a power in interpretation and inhabiting space.” I asked a fellow reporter what she wanted to play, and we landed on Patti Smith’s “Dancing Barefoot.” The speaker sometimes takes a few tries, but it encourages staying within the space. Hart’s is the only piece in Home Again that was an entirely new commission, and it was the one that I saw the most children and families playing on. Who can resist climbing on a roof?

Mark Dion and Dana Sherwood’s Pollinator Pavilion may have originated in Catskill, NY at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, but Newfields’ iteration of it uses local plants like echinacea and bee balm to attract the native hummingbirds and insects. Dion and Sherwood feel like two enigmatic nature spirits, both understated and strong in their presences. Sherwood wore a pendant with the likeness of the goddess Artemis on it, and she said her aim is to encourage people to have a “deeper, less intellectual relationship to nature.” The white gazebo that makes up Pollinator Pavilion has a couch in it for guests to sit and watch for hummingbirds like the elegant ones painted on the back façade—I saw one flit by into one of the specially designed feeders.

Pollinator Pavilion. 

“We were inspired by the Gems of Brazil hummingbird paintings, and thought ‘What’s the only thing better than a painting of a hummingbird? A real hummingbird,’” Dion said. Much of Sherwood’s pieces revolve around collaborating with animals as they engage with it, like her Feasts. “Animals don’t perform,” she said. “And plants are just food for them. We want to challenge people to think about what they can learn from animals.” 

 “Also, the sofa was out for three years, re-upholstered, and it’s covered every night,” Dion assured me about the exposure of a white couch to the elements. But allowing for exposure to the elements is part of their practice. “We like to allow for a little chaos and for things to take their own course,” Sherwood said. There’s a joy and simplicity from just allowing nature to takes its course that comes through in Dion’s and Sherwood’s collaborative projects. “A lot of my work is normally really pessimistic,” Dion said. “Working with Dana on this allowed me to take a break from melancholia.”   

Home Again offers three ways to meditate on home and belonging while simultaneously in public space. Each of the structures invites you to stay inside of it for longer. After speaking with the artists, I made sure I got some time alone in each one. In Oracle of Intimation, I attached my phone to the speaker and put on the Talking Heads’ “This Must be the Place,” my favorite song. It features the lyric: Out of all those kinds of people / you’ve got a face with a view / I’m just an animal, looking for a home, sharing some space for a minute or two. Parents, children, and dogs milled in and out of the space, but for a brief moment, it felt like my own. That’s the paradox of public art, evident in the way that Home Again sits on the same campus as a fine art museum and a family mansion: Anyone can belong in it, but it belongs to nobody. WM