100 Acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park

Indianapolis Museum of Art

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At a lot of sculpture gardens, you’ll see signs “admonishing visitors not to touch the art,” said Hilarie Sheets in The New York Times. By contrast, the Indianapolis Museum of Art’s new art park brings people as close as possible to both art and nature. Most of the installations that “dot the park’s unruly woodlands, wetlands, meadows, and lake” are interactive. Jeppe Hein’s Bench Around the Lake consists of bright yellow benches that “take fanciful swoops and turns before appearing to tunnel down into the ground” and reappear on the other side of the water. Andrea Zittel’s Indianapolis Island—“an inhabitable floating island in the shape of an igloo”—is home to two art students who occasionally invite visitors to paddle out for a visit.

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It’s nice to see a serious museum embrace a “sense of playfulness,” said Judith Dobrzynski in The Wall Street Journal. “Nowhere is that more on view” than in a work by Los Carpinteros, a Cuban artists’ collective, that pays tribute to Indiana’s favorite sport. Free Basket “combines basketball hoops with a tangle of bright red and blue arches that mimic the bounces of a ball.” Showing a similar visual wit, Joep van Lieshout arrays several “white, bone-shaped benches” to create an enormous skeleton. Still, 100 Acres isn’t all fun and games. “At the serious end of the levity spectrum,” Alfredo Jaar has created a meditative garden that is walled in by heavy stones and planted with vines. So secluded that it can only be accessed via a dark tunnel, Park of the Laments integrates into the landscape yet “feels like a world apart.”