A celebrated artwork by the environmental artist Mary Miss will be demolished by the museum that commissioned it.

On Tuesday, the Des Moines Art Center reached an agreement with Miss, 80, to dismantle her sprawling outdoor installation, “Greenwood Pond: Double Site,” in exchange for $900,000, ending the lawsuit she filed against the museum last April seeking to save it.

The Des Moines Art Center invited Miss in the late 1980s to develop a site-specific work for a city-owned park. In late 2023, the museum told her that the installation — a network of curving walkways, cantilevered bridges and seating areas designed to encourage visitors to interact with the landscape — had become a safety hazard and was at risk of collapse. Replacing the degraded materials would cost $2 million to $2.6 million, the museum said, a sum that it could not afford.

Getting rid of the work, it turns out, is also quite expensive. In addition to paying Miss, the Des Moines Art Center has estimated it will cost as much as $350,000 to dismantle “Greenwood Pond: Double Site,” according to notes from the testimony by the museum’s director, Kelly Baum. That would bring the total cost of the resolution to $1.25 million (without factoring in lawyers’ fees).

“The settlement will end a breach of contract lawsuit filed by Miss on April 4, 2024, and allow the Des Moines Art Center to proceed with previously stated plans to remove the artwork in its entirety,” the museum said in a statement.

In an interview, Miss described her feelings about the resolution as “complicated.”

“I’ve been working under the radar for quite a long time,” she said, “and here, a work being destroyed is the thing that makes the work visible again.”

In the 1970s and ’80s, Miss was part of a celebrated cohort of artists who sought to change the way viewers experience sculpture by bringing it outside the white cube. Her work made the cover of Artforum magazine in 1978, a crowning achievement for any artist. But in the decades since, her often-subtle architectural interventions made of wood, concrete and other humble materials faded from view.

Although she has been the subject of renewed scholarly attention in the last several years, it was the imminent demolition of “Greenwood Pond: Double Site” that rallied supporters around her and made headlines. “I feel this genuine sense of gratitude about how this has transpired — and at the same time I feel extremely sad,” Miss said.

The artist plans to donate a portion of the settlement funds to the Cultural Landscape Foundation, an education and advocacy group that led opposition to the work’s destruction. The money will be used to help establish a new fund to advocate for at-risk public artworks.

“This is a tragedy for the field of art history and for the status of art in our society,” Susanneh Bieber, an associate professor of art history at Texas A&M University and the author of a book on American environmental art, said of the outcome. “I thought we had arrived at a moment when environmental, ecological art projects that women have created are finally being recognized and valued.”

In pitting an artist against her onetime patron, the fight over “Greenwood Pond” also highlighted the difficulty of preserving ambitious public artworks, especially for smaller institutions in environments with increasingly extreme weather conditions. A judge in the U.S. District Court in Des Moines granted the artist’s request for a preliminary injunction in May to temporarily halt the work’s demolition.

Portions of the work have been closed to the public since late 2023. The residential deck wood used to create “Greenwood Pond,” the museum has said, could not withstand Iowa’s harsh climate. The work cost $1.5 million to create; the museum said it had already spent nearly $1 million on repairs.

Created between 1989 and 1996, “Greenwood Pond” was one of the very few environmental installations in the collection of any American museum and is considered to be among the first urban wetland projects in the country. Over seven years, Miss worked with local Indigenous communities, a botanist and others to restore the pond to its original wetland state.

Architectural elements, like an outlook tower and a recessed seating area, allowed visitors “unique opportunities to develop closer relationships to nature and a better understanding of our place in the world as active observers and caretakers,” said Leigh Arnold, curator of the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, who included Miss in the 2023 exhibition “Groundswell: Women of Land Art.” “I fear its demise illustrates our culture’s prevailing attitudes toward complex ideas or situations that necessitate thoughtfulness and tenacity to resolve.”