Well, I tried to avoid the Halloween theme since it was so obvious, but it’s the only idea coming to the surface and it’s already 8:16 and the blog is due this morning. There are multiple times each year when something goes awry that causes you to go running and screaming into the compost heap.
For me, Penrod is the culmination of the year’s major activities. Once Penrod is put to bed, Security is coasting toward the end of the year. Sure, we just had the 125th anniversary gala (I left before the auction ended), but it was just another party to us. We’ve done a hundred parties – smile, keep drinks out of the galleries, corral Freiman’s group on the 2nd floor – same old, same old. I’m talking about the heavy lifting.
The end of the Roman Art exhibit started the year for us. As usual, visitors waited till the last weekend to come see the show. The line looped completely through all the first floor galleries. We kept the visitors occupied and relatively happy while they waited two hours to see the show.
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Chocolate: The Exhibition at the Indiana State Museum satisfies with its vintage ads, wrappers and boxes along side a history of the tasty treat and its spread throughout the world. The sweetest surprise was sitting on giant chocolates in their wrappers (actually cushioned seats) at the end of the exhibition. The exhibit highlighted decorative objects used to serve chocolate, as well as the design of chocolate’s packaging. However, I didn’t see any chocolate art.
Edible art? Artists use unusual mediums these days, including chocolate. Artist Jean Wertz Zaun specializes in creating chocolate sculptures and paintings that are to be kept and cherished as works of art in their own right. In fact, last August, Zaun was commissioned by the Henry Ford Museum to create a chocolate painting to enhance their showing of Chocolate: The Exhibition. And among others, the Toledo Museum of Art commissioned 37 of Zaun’s works in chocolate to enhance their Van Gogh Fields exhibit in 2003. View a gallery of her museum commissions here.
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This weekend I visited my family up in Chicago. In addition to eating pizza, walking in the forest preserve with the dogs, and playing board games, we participated in another family tradition - a visit to the museum campus downtown. Having fond memories of these adventures, it’s no wonder I found my way into the museum community as a professional. Now I get to enjoy the museum-going experience both as an interested visitor and as an applications developer looking for inspiration.
Once upon a time, December 1980 to be exact, Italian architect-designer Ettore Sottsass had a little party to celebrate his plan to produce a new line of furniture. He invited several young design collaborators. A record was playing: Bob Dylan’s “Stuck Inside of Mobile (With the Memphis Blues Again).” When the vinyl platter kept catching on the word “Memphis,” a new design movement was christened. What punk was to music, Memphis was to design.
Sottsass and the members of the collective, including young architect Michele De Lucchi, broke through the “tyranny” of modernist taste by making furniture made from leopard print plastic laminate, celluloids, neon tubes and zinc-plated sheet-metals, jazzed up with spangles, glitter, and crazy color combos. Read the rest of this entry »
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