New Bremen, Ohio, may soon be known for more than its size. James Dicke II, the chairman and chief executive of Crown Equipment Corporation, is moving ahead with two ambitious cultural projects that could reshape the town’s profile: a James Turrell Skyspace scheduled to open in 2027 and a Modern Aboriginal Art Museum set to open at the end of 2026.
The Skyspace has been in discussion since 2023. It will be installed in the Kuenning-Dicke Natural Area, a former family farm that now includes 77 protected outdoor acres and 2.5 miles of trails. Dicke II has described the project as a “destination within a destination,” and the public setting was important to Turrell, whose work depends on carefully controlled encounters with light, sky and architecture. The site’s distance from town should also limit light pollution, improving evening viewings.
The installation adds a new chapter to Turrell’s long-running Skyspace series, which began in 1974 with a work for Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo in Varese, Italy. Since then, the American artist James Turrell (b. 1943) has created roughly 100 Skyspaces around the world, refining a format that turns a simple opening to the sky into a calibrated experience of color, atmosphere and perception.
Dicke II’s museum project points in a different direction, toward contemporary Aboriginal art and the collecting history he developed through Crown’s long ties to Australia. The single-story, 23,700-square-foot museum will present more than 100 paintings and sculptures from his collection, including works by Malaluba Gumana, Angelina Pwerle (Ngale), Rammey Ramsey and Doreen Reid Nakamarra. For Dicke II, the appeal lies not only in the visual force of the work, but in the way it carries stories across generations in the absence of a written language.
New Bremen, a town of about 3,000 people in western Ohio, already has the Bicycle Museum of America. Dicke II has said he hopes the new projects will give the area enough cultural weight to draw visitors from farther away. “It would be wonderful if New Bremen, Ohio became the Marfa of the Midwest,” he said. In a flat landscape near Dayton and the Indiana border, that ambition now has architecture, art and a public setting to support it.
