Newfields: Indianapolis Museum of Art

On the north side of Indianapolis, a hundred and fifty-two-acre cultural campus called Newfields holds one of the ten largest and ten oldest general art museums in the United States. Its origins were modest: a parlor meeting in eighteen eighty-three.

On November seventh of that year, the Art Association of Indianapolis held its first exhibition in the English Hotel on Monument Circle downtown, displaying four hundred fifty-three works by one hundred thirty-seven artists. The association's founder, educator May Wright Sewall, had organized the gathering in her home weeks earlier to discuss creating a permanent institution for the study and promotion of art. That founding vision, born in a private parlor, eventually produced one of the Midwest's great cultural anchors.

The museum grew steadily through the turn of the century. By nineteen oh six it opened the John Herron Art Institute, which combined a collection with an art school. For decades the two operated together, and the school eventually became the Herron School of Art and Design at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. The museum moved to its present site on a generous donation of land from the Lilly family, the pharmaceutical dynasty that shaped so much of Indianapolis's civic landscape in the twentieth century.

Today the campus encompasses the art museum itself, the Lilly House, a National Historic Landmark, forty acres of contemporary and historic gardens, a working greenhouse, an orchard, and the Virginia B. Fairbanks Art and Nature Park, one of the largest art-and-nature parks in the country. The institution rebranded as Newfields in twenty seventeen to reflect the breadth of what had grown around the original collection. The parlor meeting of eighteen eighty-three now sprawls across a hundred and fifty-two acres of parkland on the north side of the city.