"They blew up the front stairs of the museum during the first week that Istarted," IndianapolisMuseum of Art curator LisaFreiman said of beginning work at the institution eight years ago, when it was undergoing a major renovation. "That was a good leveler, literally and figuratively, for what was coming next." Today, Freiman is the chair of the IMA’s department of contemporary art, and she has just helped oversee the creation of another radical addition to the museum, 100 Acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park, a new sculpture garden in an unused quarry behind the museum.

With a budget of $3.6 million, Freiman and her team commissioned work from eight artists whose names are rarely associated with sculpture gardens: Atelier Van Lieshout, KendallBuster, AlfredoJaar, Jeppe Hein, Los Carpinteros, Tea Mäkipää,Type A, and AndreaZittel. Even more unusual, most of the works in the exhibition willnot be permanent additions to the park: as they deteriorate, they will be retired.

The park opened to the public last month, and the IMA just announced that it will commission a new work by New York artist Mary Miss for next year. ARTINFO spoke with Freiman about the ideas behind the unusual sculpture garden, the difficulties of building on a flood plane, and the challengeof creating collaborative projects with artists in an era after institutional critique.

How has the park been received?

It’s been extraordinary. Planning this in a city that is not a major tourist destination, you can’t assume that a particular audience and a particular group of people are going to show up. Our overly optimistic estimate was that there would be 3,000-5,000 people on our opening day, which was Sunday. We had upward of 10,000 people.

Has that led to increased attendance at the museum?

One of our idealistic hopes was that the park would be a bridge for people who had never been to the museum before. It would give them a place to enter, make them feel comfortable, and encourage them to come over to the museum itself. On opening day, we had around 5,000 people in the museum, which is more than twice as many as we normally have.

The IMA's approach to the project is pretty radical, compared with what people normally expect from a sculpture garden. How did the project come about?

When I came to the museum eight years ago, there was a pretty traditional model in place of what it was going to be. It would have been very pretty and clean and neat and organized and recreational, but it really wouldn’t have been about contemporary art. We wanted to be able to do something very interesting and very progressive.

What museums inspired your project?

The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis has been a great example of an institution doing progressive, radical, and really independent work, even when other places couldn’t. It felt to me like there was a possibility of doing that here. When I came, there was an advisory committee for the park, which included Ned Rifkin, who was director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., at the time. In 2002, he asked the toughest and best question: "What is a 21st century sculpture park? It’s not the Hirshhorn’s sculpture park, and it’s not the NationalGallerys sculpture park." It was a moment that was really exciting and terrifying. I thought, "Wow. OK. What is this going to be?" I started researching possibilities,traveling to every sculpture garden that I could, and creating categories. I realized that most of them are permanent, most of them prioritize dead or late career artists, and they usually include the same old names that we have come to know and love.

Like Markdi Suvero, RichardSerra.

Right. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! I could get a Richard Serra for the park, but it would be millions of dollars, and there goes my entire budget. I will say that we had the luck of the economy on our side, though. We had already raised most of the money for the park before the recession hit, so we had the bulk of our funding in place, which meant that we were in a verygood position to move forward on projects with artists at a time that everyone else was canceling projects. It was a time of growth for us, when most museums were contracting. Studying different projects, though,I began to notice that some of the most interesting were places that created installations of temporary works. There were different models to choose from.

What places were most informative or inspiring for you?

In terms of thinking about our site, the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands was a major inspiration. In the United States, I was also inspired by DianeShamashs "Watershed" project, which commissioned ten artists to create works in the Hudson River Valley. Shamash had been the manager of the Seattle Arts Commission and later came to New York, where she created the Minetta Brook nonprofit.

How did you become aware of "Watershed"?

I had read about it, and then I brought a group of museum patrons up to visit some of the sites. The basic idea was that Shamash wanted to use the site of the Hudson as a canvas that artists could respond to and could engage with the community around. She believed she could bring in artists from all over the world to come into these communities, to have meaningful engagements with people in order to learn about the places and get people to collaborate together to create various projects that could have only grown out of the sites that they were developed in.

What appealed to you about that?

It demonstrated to me a kind of vitality — the best that public art can be when it engages artists from different places with a particular site.It also seemed much fresher than anything else I was looking at. Everything else just felt so predictable. I did my graduate work on the 1960s and 1970s, when artists were able to experiment, when they gave themselves the freedom to do things that were really kind of crazy. We lost some of that during the 1990s and the last decade, during the art bubble. I thought, "This is kind of interesting. Here I am in an institution, trying to do this progressive project. But institutions, post-institutional critique, are supposed to be the bad guys."

How did various people react to your ideas for the park?

Many of the critics and scholars I would speak to would say, "So, are these all institutional critique projects?" They wouldn’t believe that these are actual genuine engagements, where we were collaborating with artists and enabling them to do what they want to do.

You expect trouble when you hear a name like Alfredo Jaar.

Right. I started getting amused and really excited about those reactions. The artists really got excited about it as well. Andrea Zittel said to us about her project, "You’re really going to let me do this? No museum has ever let me do this before." If we can be known as the institution where artists can come and we will make it happen, I will be really happy.

It's a great niche to have.

It’s a really great niche, especially in an encyclopedic museum, which, by its very nature, doesn’t quite know what to do with contemporary art.It’s used to hanging things on walls, in vitrines, and on pedestals. Tosuddenly say, "We need a structural engineer and an architect," it’s a whole different form of practice, a much more interdisciplinary practice. Looking at “Watershed” and smart site-responsive projects like those that Creative Time does, it dawned on me that permanence was my enemy. Thinking about anything as permanent is just a falsity anyway. Eventually things get destroyed, whether it’s through war, earthquakes, or something else.

How did you go about selecting artists?

I’m focusing on emerging and mid-career artists, or artists who have been under-recognized who are more senior, who have had a really good run in their lives, but haven’t quite gotten the attention they deserve. I was kind of shocked, for example, when I learned that Alfredo Jaar does not have a public intervention on view anywhere in the United States.

How did the landscape affect the placement of works?

The work has to be able to get wet. The area is supposed to flood only in a 100-year flood, but since those are coming every five years, we hadto be careful. There is actually less than an acre of the whole site that can be built on, so we were very restricted in terms of where certain works could be installed.

What will the future of the park look like?

We will do a new project every year. The idea is that some of the projects will start to be taken down as we evaluate them to see how they’re holdingup and what kind of issues they’re having. I think the Los Carpinteros piece may become a symbol for the city of Indianapolis in the same vein that Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggens "Spoonbridge and Cherry" has became a symbol for Minneapolis. Indianapolis never had an iconographic representation of itself, except for its war memorial, which is a pretty depressing way to represent yourself. There hasn’t been anything pointing to the present or the future. The Los Carpinteros has become an instant hit for the city.