Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog

In case you haven’t heard, there was a big announcement that the IMA was awarded a major gift from the Lilly Endowment to start a Conservation Science Laboratory at the IMA.  Needless to say, the whole department is pretty stoked!

I tried to think of a way to represent the announcement with some kind of image, but couldn’t come up with anything, so instead I made this.  That pretty much sums up what I think about the news.

Today, though, I’m in Kansas City at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art looking around.  Yeah, just looking around at the art, inside and outside.  I don’t often get to do this.  But I’m here because the Midwest Regional Conservation Guild is convening its 28th Annual Meeting this weekend.  For a long time the MRCG has been an important association for conservators in the Midwest – an organization for which I’ve been honored to be the Secretary/Treasurer for the past 4 years.

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Daniel and I are currently in Spain, traveling to Madrid, Navalcarnero and Seville, shooting video, conducting interviews and making preparations for a trip during Holy Week to document at least one procession in conjunction with an upcoming, IMA organized exhibition called, Sacred Spain: Art and Belief in the Spanish World.

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Early next year, the exhibition Preserving a Legacy: Wishard Hospital Murals opens at the IMA. It tells the story of a group of renowned Hoosier artists who painted murals for the benefit of patients at Wishard Memorial Hospital in 1914. The IMA conservation department has been working to bring these murals back to their original condition since 2004. They have completed the conservation of works by such Indiana artists as T. C. Steele, Clifton Wheeler, J. Ottis Adams and Wayman Adams.

This exhibition details the journey of conservation and hints at the power of art to heal. I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of art therapy. While the halls and galleries of a Museum are my temple of healing, I would like to experience art’s power to heal in other settings such as classrooms, hospitals or shelters.

I recently had a conversation with two dear friends–one of whom is an art therapist/art teacher at a school for emotionally troubled kids in Virginia and the other of whom has experienced the healing of power of art at a local Indiana treatment center called Selah House. Their insights are shared below:
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It’s been a pretty busy time of year in the MIS department, and as you can imagine, we spend most of our days huddled over our computers hitting keys and cursing blue screens of death. In today’s world it’s ever-so-easy to become consumed by your computer and forget about reality.

The crisp autumn breeze and smell of change in the air has always put me in a great mood and provided creative inspiration. If you’re stuck in a rut at your computer, you need to get out and take a stroll through the grounds and park here at the IMA! Your spirits will be lifted in no time, I promise. Of course, if it’s raining you can always come inside and experience the great indoors.

Unfortunately, we don’t all have the option to leave the office and get outside. So I pulled out 10 sites from my del.icio.us bookmarks and put together a list of 10 sites that bring creative inspiration directly to your browser. Read the rest of this entry »

If I ever end up on death row and get to choose my last meal, I will choose a meal a lot like one I had last month in a barn in McCordsville, IN. The soup, in particular, is hard to forget: chilled, neon-red late season Indiana tomatoes, swimming with a drop of pale fromage blanc, distilled into a shot glass, and served with a cracker, thin as a Catholic communion wafer. And that was just the second course.

The goats had stepped aside and the rain blustered outside. Eighty diners piled into the hay-filled dining hall for a five-course extravaganza presented by Slow Food Indy. Slow Food in an international movement working to reconnect people with the pleasures of real food, sustainably produced. Money raised from the dinner was used to send several local chefs and cooking students to Terra Madre, the global gastronomic gathering in Turin, Italy.

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