Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog

Following up on Matt’s great post about web design tricks is a hard act to follow, but an awesome post I saw last week gives me some inspiration and a great way to spend a bit of time.

I’d been aware of the COLOURlovers site for a while and always thought it was cool.  The site is a bit like social media meets the paint chip display at your local hardware store.  I’m always amazed at the variety of colors and associations on display at these when I’m shopping for paint.  Whether its something obvious like “Slate Blue” or mysterious like “Dusty Cairo”, I’ve always thought that the guy/gal that names the colors has a great job!

That’s why I was pretty intrigued by the COLOURlovers post about Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night. This post is a great example of how inspirational some of the works of art in our collections can be for designers and artists looking for their muse.  Somehow, to me, pulling these colors out of their context makes me think about them differently?  I decided to give it a try myself!  Setting up and account and creating palettes turned out to be a really easy and enjoyable experience.  Check out my colour lovin’ palettes!

Not to knock on Van Gogh, but I think there are a lot of great works of art to get your color inspiration from here at the IMA! I picked out several of our favorite works from among the web folks here and created palettes for them.  You can even feature images and descriptions of the things that inspired your color crafty-ness.  I used these to link back into our collection and provided images of the works of art.  I’ll admit, it was a lot more fun than I thought it would be and it did cause me to pay more attention to the artist’s choices.  Read the rest of this entry »

There are two types of books in the world—those that writers choose to write for themselves (and with the hope, of course, that someone will publish them) and those that writers are commissioned to write. I was commissioned to write Every Way Possible, the first published history of the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Or rather, to help write it, since it was far too big a job for a single writer to tackle, at least in the time allotted to do it—which was less than two years.

Okay, two years probably seems like plenty of time if you’ve never written an institutional history before. But the truth is, two years is barely enough time if what you’re trying to do is provide a reasonably comprehensive look at 125 years in the life of a major museum, which is what those of us involved in the Every Way Possible project were charged with doing. And by two years, what I mean is that at the end of that time, there would be printed and bound books in hand—which meant, working backwards from that point, we actually had about 16 months (one year + four months, for those of you keeping score at home) in which to research, write and edit a 300-page book (as well as find, identify and write captions for more than 100 photographs). The rest of the time was dedicated to designing the book (no easy task in itself), then getting it printed, bound and delivered. Read the rest of this entry »

A post the other day on Eye Level, rather subtly announced that the Lunder Center is now using Twitter.  You probably know that Eye Level is a blog produced by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and that it focuses a lot on the work that is done at Lunder Center, which as far as I know, is the first and only conservation department that functions as a permanent museum exhibit (instead of being tucked away in the museum, conservators are at work and on view behind floor-to-ceiling glass walls ).  But maybe you don’t know about Twitter: it’s a web site to which you send text messages from your cell phone (called “tweets”) that are then displayed for everyone to see.  You can “follow” your friend’s tweets (or a museum artifact’s in this case) to know what they are doing and thinking.

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I thought I would use my space on the blog this week to give you a sneak peek of the new website we are creating for the upcoming show, Power and Glory: Court Arts of China’s Ming Dynasty.

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Class Pictures: Photographs by Dawoud Bey opens tomorrow night at the IMA with a conversation with artist Dawoud Bey followed by an opening party. For the exhibition, Bey photographed young people from all parts of the economic, racial and ethnic spectrum in both public and private high schools. I had the pleasure of asking Bey about his work earlier this year:

Interview with artist Dawoud Bey
As published in the fall issue of the IMA’s Previews membership magazine

Q. Can you tell us when you became interested in portraiture?
As I began to figure out what I wanted to do as an artist, I was spending a lot of time going to museums and galleries looking at work by other photographers. The pictures that resonated for me most strongly were those that were of human subjects. There seemed to me something quite powerful about a person confronting the camera, returning the attention of the photographer. Read the rest of this entry »