In 2021, the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields transformed the museum’s fourth-floor contemporary art gallery into a high-tech digital art exhibition space called Lume. Over the past five years, this controversial initiative has featured immersive, accessible exhibitions such as “Van Gogh Alive” (2021), “Monet and Friends Alive” (2022-23) and “Dali Alive” (2024-25).
However, in late February, the museum announced that Lume’s current exhibition, “Connections: Land, Water, Sky – Art and Music from Aboriginal Australia,” would close on February 28 as its final exhibition.
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the museum said in a statement to the museum indianapolis business journal The closure will make way for “a new monumental exhibition that will further the Indianapolis Museum of Art’s vision for contemporary art and expand the way audiences experience art at Newfields,” but no details were given on what this new effort would entail.
The Lume space was created by Australian company Grande Experiences, which specializes in immersive experiences in the arts and sciences. Melbourne’s Lume outpost, located in the city’s convention and exhibition centre, opened in 2021 and closed last summer. Grande Experiences also runs the Museo Leonardo da Vinci in a 15th-century church in Rome – “not just a museum, but an experience!”.
Lume’s launch in the summer of 2021 coincides with multiple staffing controversies at the museum. Earlier that year, Newfield Museum president Charles Venable resigned after public outcry over a job posting seeking a director who could sustain the museum’s “traditional, core, white art audience.” A year later, Colette Pierce Burnette succeeded Venable, but resigned after just 15 months. Belinda Tate, whose position sparked the firestorm, was eventually hired as director in 2023 but is still working at the museum.
Newfield’s current exhibitions include “Luminous Horizons: Celebrating the Legacy of JMW Turner” (through August 2), an exhibition of newly acquired contemporary art, and an exhibition of work by three queer artists inspired by the Rococo style (through March 29).
