Newfields: The Estate Indianapolis Kept for Everyone
A mansion, a hundred acres of sculpture park, and an encyclopedic museum on one bluff above the river: Newfields is Indianapolis's estate, held in common.
Newfields occupies 152 acres on the White River's west bluff — a museum, a mansion, gardens, and a hundred-acre art and nature park — and it is the Indianapolis Museum of Art's answer to the question of what a museum campus can hold. The institution dates to 1883; the campus, anchored by the Lilly House mansion and its gardens, has been its home since 1970, and its modern identity, as Newfields, wraps the whole estate in the slogan its founders would have recognized: a place for nature and the arts.
The museum's collections run deep in exactly the places a Midwestern encyclopedic museum should: European painting through the moderns, one of the country's significant holdings of Asian art, major holdings of Gauguin and the Pont-Aven school, American painting from the Hudson River to the present, and a design collection that fills its contemporary galleries. The Robert B. and Ann M. White galleries' skylit halls stage the permanent collection against the bluff's light.
Outside, The Garden spreads the collection into landscape: the Lilly House, the 1913 French-inspired mansion of pharmaceutical heir J.K. Lilly Jr., kept in its period splendor; formal gardens by the Olmsted firm's successor landscape architects; and beyond them The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park — a hundred acres where large-scale contemporary sculpture stands in woods and meadow along the river, free to all comers, dawn to dusk.
The campus model is the argument: one admission's campus — or a free walk in the park — where art, horticulture, and landscape architecture are presented as one continuous subject. Indianapolis's other great estates became subdivisions. This one became a public trust with a café.
November is the gardens' sculptural season and the museum's gearing toward Winterlights, the holiday display that strings the estate in a million lights and has become one of the region's definitive December rituals. In the gray weeks before it, the grounds belong to the regulars: herons on the lake, the mansion's windows lit, the bluff above the river holding its century of quiet.
