Over 100 pieces of American Indian art – including ritual objects, pottery, basketry and textiles – give our newest exhibition Art of the American Indians: The Thaw Collection a diverse and informative angle. The IMA’s access to these works is amazing in and of itself, but upon looking deeper into the variety of art featured in the Clowes Special Exhibition Gallery, it’s clear these pieces are more than just fun to look at.

The American Indian tradition is most immediately recognizable by its elaborate clothing and textiles; bright colors, rich textures, intricate patterns, soft feathers, complex beadwork, glimmering shells, painterly embroidery, and countless other materials define their clothing tradition. American Indian clothing has actually become a bit of a trend as of late – “Navajo” patterns and prints dominate stores like Urban Outfitters, which has recently come under fire for falsely identifying their clothes as such. Clothing, jewelry, and accessories in imitation-Indian styles were deemed “distasteful” and “racially demeaning,” and while that was most likely not the intention, it makes you wonder why the Urban Outfitters buyers were so careless about what they were selling.  They didn’t know an authentic print from a fake, but how could they? Along with this new “trend” comes an equally prevalent lack of education about American Indian traditions, which is why collections like the Thaws’ are so necessary.

The fashion news enthusiast in me was drawn first to the clothing and textiles in the exhibition; I was fascinated to see the original patterns and techniques American Indians created. I was uninformed about… well, everything beyond what I learned in elementary school.  None of my high school courses embraced the subject, nor did I ever realize I was missing out on vital information.

I decided textiles would be my starting point.

The difference between authentic American Indian textiles and the imitations we see in boutiques is context.  Girls today wear “Navajo” patterns because they’re cute and colorful; American Indians wore them to tell a story. Each piece has meaning – often about spirituality, family, and even animals.  Take the seal gut parka for example: Eskimo hunters wore these to protect themselves from wind and rain, but they let the parkas themselves emphasize their respect for the animal. Women carefully cleaned and blew air into the guts, then made the tubes opaque by freeze-drying them. Then they stitched V-shaped patterns to represent harpoon heads, wolves’ teeth, and mountains.

Hunters also wore hunting coats which covered the entire body and were often constructed of caribou skin. While at first it doesn’t seem particularly striking, the coat is rich with spiritual symbolism: the elaborate painted decorations were meant to honor the spirits of the caribou as well as bring success in the hunt. The triangular gusset in the back symbolizes the magical mountain from which the caribou left to surrender to the hunters.  The other patterns on the coat represent dreams, which wives interpreted and stitched into a design.

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Filed under: Art, Exhibitions

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.

Filed under: Art, Art and Nature Park, Contemporary

This is the first post in a monthly series about my work on the African Art collection.  I came to the IMA in October to complete a nine-month fellowship that will serve as the final requirement for my master’s degree in art conservation from New York University’s Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts.

My first weeks at the museum have been filled with introductions.  In addition to meeting new coworkers, there were plenty of new places to get to know as part of the job.  Work-related travel has included a day trip to the Miller House in Columbus, Indiana to examine furniture in storage, condition checking the Mary Miss installation FLOW: Can You See The River? in 100 Acres, and a behind-the-scenes tour of the historic Oldfields-Lilly House and Gardens.

My introduction to the museum’s collection of African Art, however, is proving to be the most complicated. One of my main responsibilities at the IMA is to help prepare that collection for reinstallation early next year. This will involve months of surveying, testing and treating objects in that collection, as well as consulting on matters of storage and display. To begin to tackle this project, I wanted to assemble a list of the objects in the IMA’s collection of African Art, in order to ensure that my survey is thorough.

That practical, seemingly simple, request led me straight into questions of how African Art is defined at the IMA. If the answer seems apparent–that African Art is defined as art that comes from Africa–then consider the following example. The IMA owns two works by the living artist El Anatsui, who was born in Ghana and currently works in Nigeria. One work, Sacred Comb, is on display in the Eiteljorg suite of African Art. However, the other piece, Duvor (Communal Cloth) is displayed in the museum’s Contemporary Art galleries.

Which artwork by El Anatsui is classified as African Art at the IMA?

Because these two curatorial departments use different criteria to define their collections (geography vs. time period), both can claim either work.  Furthermore, the IMA’s department of Textiles and Fashion Arts uses still different parameters for defining their collection–those of medium and use.  As a work that references traditional West African strip-woven textiles, Duvor (Communal Cloth) is actually catalogued as part of the Textiles and Fashion Arts collection.

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Filed under: Art, Conservation, The Collection

As a museum photographer, I get asked on occasion what is involved with my work.  What do I do?  My response is fairly straightforward, “I document the objects and exhibitions at the IMA.” But the specifics of my work are rarely detailed. And that is what I intend to do here. If you feel the intricacies of museum photography are best left unwritten then stop reading at, “I [just] document the objects and exhibitions at the IMA.”

For those of you who have a taste for the technical and an appreciation of process, begin reading here:

Art Directed Photography

Unfortunately for me (and I would argue the patron), this is what I get to do the least.

Art Directed photography requires a fair amount pre-planning and time to explore an approach to photography of an object or setting.  It requires the input of multiple parties, is of high quality, and has a distinct “look” to the final image.  These images are generally intended for more targeted uses in magazine and catalogues.

The images below of Alberto Meda’s Light-Light chair were taken with a Mamiya 645D and a Phase One P45 digital back. The inspiration came from our Senior Curator of Design Arts Craig Miller, who wanted to focus on the texture of the material. The silhouette of the chair legs emerges from the darkness to reveal the back and the carbon fiber texture.

Alberto Media, "Light-Light chair (prototype)," 1988, carbon fiber and Nomex composite. Purchased with funds provided by James E. and Patricia J. LaCrosse.

Here’s another example of an art directed photo shoot:

Allesandro Mendini and Alessandro Guerriero, "Side chair from Ollo Collection,"1988, plastic, laminate. Frank Curtis Springer and Irving Moxley Springer Purchase Fund. © Alessandro Guerriero.

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Filed under: Art, IMA Staff, Photography

I thought that this might be an opportunity to talk about aspects of the Out Of This World exhibition that are not so public. An insider’s view, perhaps. The easiest way for me to think about what has transpired with each project is just to walk through the exhibition in my mind, project by project.

Flight:  This is the first project you see as you enter the museum and the last project to be installed in the galleries. It was a hair-puller.  As you may or may not know, my business, Indianapolis Fabrications, built the sculptural works in my exhibition, as well as built and installed the Mary Miss Flow project, which opened to the public two weeks after my opening. If building two monumental exhibitions wasn’t bad enough, my business partner, Randy Domeck, had a wedding to attend that kept him out of the shop the two weeks before my opening. Add to that, my teaching contract at Herron School of Art and Design also started around that same time. Most of my work was installed by this point, but I was in a panic trying to manage everything going on. Luckily, we have responsible employees at iFab and Randy found time to handle some management of the business projects remotely.  He arrived in Indianapolis the day before my opening and we installed Flight in one day – the Wednesday before the preview and artist talk.  Phew!

Space Suits:  I had every intention of making these suits myself, but the scope of the exhibition quickly made me realize that in order to complete the work on time, I needed more help. Kyle Perry and Adam Buente of PROJECTiONE offered to help make a model of the space helmet. They found a 3D model of the space suit on the NASA website and were able to use that file to CNC cut the foam model, making my helmets very accurate reproductions of the original. Once I had the model, I made the mold and cast the helmets. Patrick Fitzpatrick had been a graduate student of mine at the School at the Art Institute of Chicago and he CNC cut a form for vacuum forming the visors. Meanwhile, I wasn’t home enough to do the sewing and knew that many of the parents at my son Angus’ school (IPS #84 CFI) were gifted craftspeople, so Donna and I started asking around if anyone would want to take on the project of sewing the suits.  Thank goodness Beth Hannan stepped up and said she could do it. I gave her my reference material and she did the rest in awesome detail.

Phoom: I built this project while at Sculpture Space in Utica, NY. Once I made the sculpture and it was ready to be painted, I was nervous about getting a finish that approximated flesh as closely as I wanted, never having airbrushed something like this before (this was also my first figurative sculpture).  The administration at Sculpture Space suggested that I go to the Golden Paints headquarters, which was only 45 minutes away in New Berlin, NY.  At Golden, Michael Townsend spent the afternoon training me to use Golden products and instructing me on using an airbrush. The other thing I needed help with was hair.  Yvonne at Yvonne’s Hair Designs in Whitesboro, NY makes custom wigs for cancer patients and was game to help get my sculpture wigged. It was a pretty funny moment to haul the sculpture into a typical hair salon for its first and only haircut. I often get curious looks when making my work.

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Filed under: Art, Contemporary