Museum's pond to be remade into a work of art

RALEIGH -- It's best if no one even notices the murky stormwater retention pond in a neglected corner of the N.C. Museum of Art park. And most visitors do not, drawn instead to the other 100 or so acres of rolling grassland and woods that are sprinkled with contemporary sculpture and hiking paths.

Yet within a couple of years the bland pool could be the park's main attraction, resurrected by the combined forces of art and science. With its terraces of trees, shrubs and water-loving plants, the pond will become a water run-off demonstration project, an outdoor classroom for science studies and a piece of art.

It will be the latest transformation by New York artist Mary Miss, who has spent the past three decades exploring a mix of architecture, landscape design and installation art around the country. Recently she began to combine that exploration with such disciplines as geology and hydrology to make art that solves actual ecological problems and educates the wider community at the same time.

The Raleigh project may be the only installation of its kind developed by a museum, though other art and science partnerships have appeared in public places in recent years.

"Museums have been unsure what to do with us," Miss told an audience at the museum last week, where she gave the first public preview of what the project will look like. "Now we have the possibility of catch-up. ... You here in North Carolina can be at the start of making this happen."

The project began several years ago when museum planners started thinking about what to do with the pond, which was built in the 1980s to handle runoff during the museum's construction. During storms, rainwater surges down the sloping ground and through underground pipes and overflows the pond, sending sediment and polluted water into House Creek and the overtaxed Neuse River basin.

The planners brought in Miss because of her work with the natural environment and particularly with water. (She had designed South Cove on the banks of the Hudson River in New York's Battery Park.)

Miss started meeting with environmental scientists from N.C. State University and a hydrologist from Denver. A $1.6 million state clean-water grant got the project going, and a like amount is being raised privately. The pond should be finished in late 2009, when the museum's new galleries building is set to open.

The intersection of art and science was new territory for Linda Dougherty, the museum's contemporary art curator, who has supervised the selection of artwork for the park.

"I've been looking at a lot of artists who are interested in the natural world," Dougherty said. "This is the first time I've worked directly with an artist to come up with a real solution to a real issue -- artwork that really is functional."

Work that matters

For Miss, the project is the culmination of her growth as an artist trying to find a place that matters to society.

After graduating from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1966, she studied sculpture at the Maryland Art Institute and began working in the emerging realm of public art. Despite her success and acclaim, she learned difficult lessons.

With public art, Miss says, artists are usually told what to do -- cover up something unsightly, for example -- and are limited by a small budget. Bureaucracy and politics tend to dilute the final result.

"I've been kind of forced into shoes that are too tight -- the tight shoe is public art," Miss told an audience at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in October. "I had helped develop this idea of working in the public domain with the notion that I could affect things in the world. Instead there were all these assignments, restrictions, don't to this, don't do that."

Percentage-for-art programs, in which money is set aside for public art, have paid for a lot of bland pieces around the country, she said in Raleigh. Other projects lack connection with their communities.

Miss began looking for new ways to define art so that it really meant something to people and changed the way they looked at the world.

Rather than being seen as reclusive and a little crazy, artists could shape the culture, she said. She chose to collaborate with scientists and others and to focus on the built and natural environments.

First came a series of false starts, ambitious projects derailed by a lack of funding or popular support. But Miss said she has begun to have some successes.

A project in Boulder, Colo., this year got people talking about the threat of building in a floodplain. Scientists welcomed the attention and benefited from three-dimensional imaging that was done in conjunction with the artwork.

The question that drove the Raleigh project, Miss said, was: "How can we make people aware of the water in an intimate way?"

Instead of a static body of water, the pond will illustrate how water moves across the park and is filtered, namely through the series of plants divided by terraces along the slopes. Once it reaches the pond, the water will disappear into a hole that amplifies the ideas of movement and sound.

In a region challenged by drought, she said, bombarding people with water conservation rules and admonitions isn't the only solution.

"That's not going to engage people," she said. "Using artists is the best thing we have at hand today."