The seventy-five-year-old Des Moines Art Center is the only art museum in Des Moines and one of the few art museums in the country with an affiliated art school open to all. It welcomes over 300,000 visitors annually to its storied campus comprising three historic buildings—designed by renowned architects Eliel Saarinen, I. M. Pei, and Richard Meier—and its Pappajohn Sculpture Park. Founded as an encyclopedic museum, the Art Center’s foucs shifted to primarily modern and contemporary art beginning in 1969.

Sustainability is a core consideration of the Art Center’s strategic planning. A Catalyst Grant will partially fund the purchase and installation of an LED lighting system in the Art Center’s I.M. Pei Building. Lighting design defines how visitors view and interact with works of art. The current lighting system features fixed canisters in a vaulted ceiling. These fixtures can be neither dimmed nor controlled from the floor via Bluetooth. They are outdated, energy inefficient, and do not provide sufficient general lighting as visitors explore the museum. The new lighting—which will replace over eighty light fixtures with new ones that are of museum quality, flexible and adaptable, Bluetooth capable, and energy efficient—will represent a considerable environmental and aesthetic improvement over the existing system, and have an overall impact on over 8,500 square feet of gallery space. The sustainability impacts of this project will include an annual energy savings of 36,714.6 kilowatt hours, cost savings of $2,570.02, and emissions reduction of 28.3 tons of CO2.