The Indianapolis Museum of Art is issuing a call for proposals for a summer 2012 six-week residency on Andrea Zittel’s Indianapolis Island within the IMA’s 100 Acres. Graduate and undergraduate students, as well as emerging professionals in the fields of art, design, architecture and performing arts are encouraged to apply to customize and reside on the Island.

Anchored in the 35-acre lake within 100 Acres, Indianapolis Island is a habitable “off-the-grid” structure accessible by rowboat. The 2012 residency will be the third to take place there. During the artwork’s inaugural summer in 2010, Herron School of Art and Design students Jessica Dunn and Michael Runge activated the installation with their project Give and Take, which consisted of a series of visitor interactions based on a system of exchange. The 2011 island resident was Katherine Ball, a student of Portland State University’s Art + Social Practice MFA program. Over the course of her residency, titled No Swimming, Ball initiated a series of ecological interventions in the lake and engaged a local audience through a series of public programs centered on the topic of water.

At about twenty feet in diameter, the Island serves as an experimental living structure that examines the daily needs of contemporary human beings. Residents collaborate with Zittel by adapting and modifying the structure according to their individual needs. The project blends elements of environmental art, sculpture, design and performance in a unique way, offering a challenging and experimental forum for exploring ideas about individualism and self-sufficiency.

If you’d like to be the 2012 Indianapolis Island resident, visit www.imamuseum.org/islandresidency for more information, including photos and renderings of the structure and to learn how to apply. Proposals are due Friday, January 13, 2012.

If you’d feel more at ease watching the residency unfold from the 100 Acres lake shore or online, stay tuned to the IMA’s blog in spring 2012 to find out who will be the next person to call Indianapolis Island home.

Andrea Zittel’s Indianapolis Island is now occupied by artist Katherine Ball. For the second residency on this habitable living structure within the IMA’s 100 Acres, she will attempt to improve the water quality of the 35-acre lake through her project, No Swimming.

During her time in Indianapolis, Katherine will investigate the sources of water flowing into the park’s lake and seek to understand how these inflows affect the quality of the lake’s water. She is bicycling along the edge of the White River in order to become familiarized with this body of water, which borders and often flows into the 100 Acres lake. She began the first leg of her journey on August 9 at the north fork of the river, and will live on Indianapolis Island from August 12 until September 25. After her residency, Ball will resume her trek, which will conclude at the intersection of the White and Wabash rivers.

 Follow the project with Katherine – and learn how you can become involved – through her blog, which she regularly updates here.

The IMA has selected Katherine Ball to be the summer 2011 resident of Andrea Zittel’s Indianapolis Island, an inhabitable installation in 100 Acres. Throughout her residency–which will take place between August 9th and September 22nd – Ball will engage Indianapolis Island, the surrounding 35-acre lake, and visitors to the Park through public programs and ecological interventions.

Ball’s project will center on the improvement of the lake’s water quality through the implementation of mycofilters, a water purification system consisting of hemp tubes, wood chips, and mushroom mycelium. Visitors will be welcomed to Indianapolis Island at regularly scheduled times to have afternoon tea with Ball and observe her initiatives more closely. Ball will communicate her findings through a series of drawings and ongoing blog posts, as well as through close interaction with Park visitors during activities such as weekly nature walks and yoga sessions. Stay tuned for more details about how to become involved with Katherine’s residency—further details will be posted on this site as the residency draws closer.

Ball’s artistic practice is founded on a hands-on approach to environmental activism and social engagement.

In 2010, Ball filmed a documentary (to be released this winter) about small-scale, yet effective, solutions to climate change as she bicycled with a small group from Oregon to Washington, D.C., where they met with legislators and shared their findings. Afterward, Ball traveled to Cancun, Mexico, to participate in the United Nations Climate Change Conference. From 2009–10 Ball co-directed SEA Change Gallery in Portland, Oregon, which developed exhibitions and activities to encourage social and environmental equality. Ball is currently enrolled in Portland State University’s Art + Social Practice MFA program and participated in an exchange at the School of Walls and Space in Copenhagen this past spring.

Ai Weiwi, "Remembering," installed at the Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2009.

Prominent Chinese artist Ai Weiwei was detained by police in Beijing’s airport on April 3^rd while attempting to board a flight to Hong Kong. He continues to be held in police custody, with little information released about the events surrounding his arrest. (Learn more about the accusations here.) A longtime human rights activist, Ai openly criticizes the Chinese government and risks his personal safety to expose governmental misconduct. Active since the late 70’s and early 80’s, he has become increasingly more outspoken throughout his 30-year artistic career, which has caused him to become the subject of sustained, intense scrutiny by the Chinese government.

Ai WeiWei is one of dozens of activists taken into custody by the Chinese government since February. Fearing an uprising akin to those in the Middle East and North Africa, the government began to preemptively take into custody the most prominent human rights activists in China.

To show support for Ai and hopefully hasten his release, a petition has been created by an international group of art museum directors. Sign the petition here. In London, Tate Modern is currently exhibiting a 2010 installation by the artist entitled Sunflower Seeds, and has become a location for outcry against his arrest.

Ai Weiwei’s activism is tied to his art. In 2008, an earthquake in Sichuan, China, caused poorly built schools to collapse, killing thousands of local school children.  When the government failed to publish the names or amount of deceased students, Ai and other activists began to investigate to uncover the truth—that Sichuan officials allowed for the construction of unsafe schools. Ai was beaten by the police in 2009 while preparing to testify in the trial of Tan Zuoren, a writer and activist who was also conducting research about the events in Sichuan. Despite this act of violence, Ai WeiWei continued to commemorate the students that died.  His installation tiled the façade of the museum with backpacks, which spelled out in Chinese characters “She lived happily for seven years in this world,” a statement by a mother of a victim in the Sichuan earthquake.

Brooklyn-based conceptual artist William Lamson is creating the newest installation for the IMA’s Efroymson Family Entrance Pavilion. This expansive sculptural and sound installation is composed of used communication towers and a series of audio components. The hybrid structure, which has been reconstructed so that the tower appears to fold in on itself, acts as an antenna to pick up a weather radio signal from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The radio signal triggers vibrations within the tower, and rather than transmitting the broadcaster’s voice throughout the surrounding space, instead the sound of the vibrating tower as it is amplified through speakers mounted within the hollow legs of the structure proliferates.

Lamson first began experimenting with resonant sound during his recent Binaural / Nodar Artist Residency in Portugal. The artist attached rocks to a metal railing on a bridge that spanned a river. The rocks were then attached to bottles that floated in the river via long strings. When the bottles bobbed in the river, the rocks struck the railing, creating a low-frequency, ringing sound captured through microphones Lamson affixed to the metal.

Railing, rocks, string, and bottles in Nodar, Portugal.

The river.

Similarly, the artist often develops devices that harness the power inherent within the natural environment in his practice. In 2009 Lamson created a series of automatic drawing apparatuses that harness the power of wind or water. Lamson attached a drawing utensil to his inventions, which then created fine, detailed works determined by the surrounding weather conditions. His project for the IMA will similarly make apparent the unseen forces that surround us, as a radio signal (also linked with the weather) is made audible and tactile through the vibrations in the tower.

Lamson’s automatic drawing titled "Jan 28, 09 1130AM–230PM, Colonia Valdense, Uruguay"

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