To Reach New Audiences, Museums Are Redefining What They Offer

Featured on nytimes.com

As guests walk into the lobby of the Indianapolis Museum of Art they are greeted by a seven-and-a-half-foot blue plastic snail, often surrounded by a group of squealing, joyful children daring to touch it.

It might not be what most people expect from one of the oldest museums in the country. But along with summer mini-golf events (holes designed by local and regional artists), a Winterlights display and a beer garden, this Midwestern institution is changing everything from its name — now branded as Newfields for the museum and related sites — to its mission and its admission price.

The new identity is part of a trend throughout the arts world in which museums are taking revolutionary steps — some cheered, some not — to attract new audiences and stabilize their revenues.

“I think this is the direction many museums are headed in, including our own,” said Lori Fogarty, director of the Oakland Museum of Art and president of the Association of Art Museum Directors. Most museums are grappling with attracting a wider and more diverse audience, she said, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art “has done it in a very, very interesting way.”

Maybe too interesting, some people say. Hugh Davies, director emeritus of the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, said he understood the need to try “new models and getting museums to update, but we don’t want to lose the reasons we have museums in the first place — as a wonderful oasis, not a Midwestern boardwalk.”

As part of its reinvention, the museum changed the name of its campus to Newfields last summer to play off its location on the former estate known as Oldfields. It was bequeathed more than 50 years ago by the family of pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly to what was then the Art Association of Indianapolis.

Newfields includes the museum, a 52-acre botanical garden and Lilly House, the former family mansion. An adjoining 100-acre park, with a 35-acre lake, is free to the public.

The museum contains an encyclopedic collection of art from the old masters to Impressionists to an 11,000-square-foot contemporary design gallery. Perhaps its most instantly recognizable object is the LOVE sculpture by the favorite-son artist Robert Indiana. Since it was moved indoors to the museum’s great hall last year, at least 10 weddings have been taken place in front of it.

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