Broad Ripple's ArtsPark Spent August Underwater. Here's What Came Back This Fall.

"I've been here full-time for 16 years and I've never seen water up that high," Shannon Bennett, the Indy Art Center's vice president of exhibitions and events, told WRTV on the day ArtsPark reopened. "To see all the statues down there underwater, it was pretty hard."

The park sits behind the Art Center at 820 E. 67th St. in Broad Ripple. In August, the White River came up over it about six weeks before a September grand reopening that had been years in the making. The opening slipped to Saturday, Oct. 17. The flood cost the park its date, but it also tested the $3.7 million renovation. The new limestone set along the riverbank to stabilize it got its first hard test from the river, and it held.

A park that took 21 years to finish

The Indianapolis Art Center building opened in 1996. Michael Graves, the internationally known architect who went to Broad Ripple High School, designed it as a long, linear building meant to connect to the land around it, according to IndyStar. ArtsPark followed in 2005. Graves' firm planned it with the Indianapolis landscape architecture firm Rundell Ernstberger Associates.

"Michael's architecture was inspired by sort of the Italian villa, and the settings of those Italian villas are very lush terraced garden settings," REA partner Kevin Osburn told IndyStar.

The 2005 park got the walkways, pergolas and sculptures. What it never got was enough money to build the whole design, Osburn told the paper. The current work goes back to the center's 2019 master plan. It sits inside a larger $10 million fundraising effort that also paid for a new HVAC system and studio upgrades, president Mark Williams told IndyStar. So what reopened this month is close to the park first planned for the 2005 opening, with a stronger tie to the river and to the Monon Trail.

Where the water reached

The National Weather Service's summary of the August 2026 flooding says the White River reached levels not seen since 1913 during the Aug. 11 to 17 event. At ArtsPark, the water covered all but the top of John McNaughton's "Twisted House." It rose toward the eyes of John Andrew Spaulding's bronze face, "Black Titan." It came up the stairs toward the Graves building and stopped just short of getting inside, as Williams described it to IndyStar.

WTHR reported that the center's director put the damage at $500,000 or more, covering artwork, art supplies, landscaping, trees and cleanup. The reopening planned for late September moved to Oct. 17.

Artists and neighbors helped with the cleanup. Valerie Bielski, a local artist and longtime Fall Fest vendor, told WRTV she saw people helping "with cleanup efforts, donations, with them collecting things from other locals in the area."

What the river couldn't move

The surprise is what held. Shortly before the flood, crews had set slabs of Indiana limestone along the bank to stabilize it and give visitors a better view of the river. Williams told IndyStar his staff spent the days after the storm worried the water had knocked those slabs over. It hadn't. The limestone and the new walkways, which replaced the old crushed rock, both made it through. Center officials told WRTV they think the limestone walls along the river kept the water from doing even more damage.

The sculptures needed more help. Before the flood, students from Herron School of Art & Design had refurbished about 20 returning works. After the water went down, they did it again. "Twisted House," popular enough nationally to have its own Yelp page, held steady, and its wooden frame has dried out. "There was a lot of debris, a lot of power washing, a lot of re-seeding the grounds," Bennett told WRTV, "but it looks really good now."

A walk through the new ArtsPark, in order

The park covers nearly 10 acres of the Art Center campus. It's open dawn to dusk, and admission is free. You can walk in from the Monon Trail or from the Art Center parking lot. Coming from the Monon, here's the order you'll meet the new pieces:

1. The Monon entrance. Crews cleared overgrowth to open a new entrance you can see from the trail. Before, the park was easy to walk right past.
2. The curved walkway and elevated boardwalk. This is the new route to the new artwork, and it ends with a view out over the White River.
3. The limestone riverbank steps. These are the slabs that stayed put in August.
4. The Lawrance plaza. A new hardscape plaza honors Joe and Will Lawrance, twin artists who graduated from North Central High School.
5. Seven new sculptures. Five are bronzes by the late Dora Natella, who taught at Indiana University South Bend. One of them is "Sentinel." Allison Baker, who teaches at Herron, made the other two from steel, concrete and bronze, including "Monument to the Fallen Soldiers."
6. The returning favorites. "Twisted House" and "Black Titan" are both back, now standing near the new pieces.

What's still growing back

The stone, boardwalk and sculptures came through, but the living parts of the park took real damage. A few days before the reopening, IndyStar reported that the flood had washed away newly seeded grass and plantings. Some trees were leaning at 30-degree angles, and nobody knew yet whether they'd survive. The outdoor electricity wasn't working, and the picnic tables had floated downstream.

That makes this fall the park's first season of recovery. Bring a blanket instead of counting on a picnic table. Expect some bare ground where new planting was meant to be filling in by now. And if you know the old park, look for the trees that are still leaning. Whether they recover is one of the things to watch here over the next year.

The galleries are the cold-weather half of the visit

ArtsPark was always meant to work as an outdoor extension of the Graves building. As the evenings get colder and dusk comes earlier, the eight indoor galleries make the second half of a walk. Exhibitions there are always free and open to the public.

The Fall Exhibition Series is up through Dec. 13:

• "Legends in Focus," drawn from the International Photography Hall of Fame collection. It includes Steve McCurry's "Afghan Girl," Ansel Adams' "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico" and Harold Edgerton's "Bullet Through Apple."
• "Bodies of Water" by Josh Rush.
• "Interior/Exterior: The Contemporary Modern Dream House" by Elissa Morley.
• "Buck & Bernice: Love in the Reign of War" by Heydon Buchanon.
• The Military Community Exhibition, in the Katharine B. Sutphin Community Gallery and Ruth Lilly Library.

On the calendar, Concerts for a Cause runs Saturday, Nov. 14, from 6 to 10 p.m. Proceeds go to a participating nonprofit.

If you haven't been since summer, walk in from the Monon, take the boardwalk out to the limestone steps, and finish in the photography galleries. That route covers the 2005 plan, the new work and the flood repairs in about an afternoon.

Our team at Shelly Walters Realty Group loves seeing a place like ArtsPark come back stronger, with help from the neighbors who live around it. If you're thinking about a home near the Monon or along the river in north Indianapolis, we'd be glad to talk it through over a walk. Let our family help your family. Contact us today.