Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog

Warning: This post is somewhat technical, kind of lengthy, and it has an example of early recycling near the end.

A former professor of mine recently called with some technical questions about the Conservation

Department’s new x-ray equipment. Instead of responding to him via e-mail I thought I would provide a kind of open response here. And why not, right? It just might be interesting to you and perhaps also to my colleagues in the conservation world. Besides, in my mind, the IMA’s blog seems to be the perfect place to discuss x-radiography considering the previous non sequiturs of Cheesecake and Redbuds.

I’m a little worried, though, because I doubt many of the folks upstairs realize that we have the capacity to produced x-rays down here in the basement and this might make them a bit nervous. I think it’s fair to say that most people have a fear of x-rays for good reason, because they have the potential to change humans on the atomic level, and that’s unnatural at best; but, trust me, we’ve taken a lot of safety precautions to make sure that all of the x-rays that we produce stay in the room that they are produced in. The room is an enclosed space that is lined all the way around with an 1/8 of an inch of lead. We use a Geiger counter to confirm that this room is successfully containing the energy.

Read the rest of this entry »

As I get ready for another busy summer of maintaining the outdoor sculptures here at the IMA, I thought I would share some information about some work I completed last summer with the fine help of intern Cydney Campbell (she is also an undergrad at Herron and a world-renown Irish dancer – here’s a picture of her in mid dance).

During the muggiest weeks of August we completed a pretty major treatment on one of the more important sculptures on the Oldfields estate, the Three Graces. Consisting of a solid piece of carved white marble perched on a limestone base, the sculpture had become pretty dirty over recent years. Here’s how it look before we got started:

Side note #1, though we have a good idea of when and why the sculpture was placed in this important location of Percival Gallagher’s landscape design we don’t have a clear sense of who actually made it. (Side note #2, I desperately wanted to put a link to Gallagher’s Wikipedia article, but sadly one doesn’t exist. There is some info on him in the book Pioneers of American Landscape Design, published by LALH)

Read the rest of this entry »

Meet Christina Gentry; she’s the first – and so far the only – person to take me up on my offer to have lunch at Pucks with the IMA’s director, Max Anderson, for making a Wikipedia article about one of the IMA’s outdoor sculptures. As for TED, I’ll get to that later.

First check out Christina’s Wikipedia article on the Sutphin Fountain, which even has a link to a set of pictures of the fountain on Flickr.com. Nice work, Christina!

Read the rest of this entry »

Having Adrian Schiess at the IMA last fall to install his exhibition was a unique experience for the whole group that worked on the show. During the installation, I spent the better part of a week working with contemporary curator Rebecca Uchill, (whose IMA employee profile includes some Schiess installation video), and a host of other folks helping to install the works – everyone played a part from marketing to installation to the Nuggets to security. Though the physical labor wasn’t great, the work was demanding and the result was remarkable: the IMA has installed Adrian’s largest solo exhibition, and his first solo exhibition in the U.S.

Read the rest of this entry »

Maybe it’s the environment, but around here I’m always obsessing about the littlest things. The other day I devoted eight hours to looking at and learning more about some insects and pests. Needless to say the presence of these things at a museum can lead to big problems for art.

I visited the locally-owned, but world-renown, Insects Limited headquarters to take part in a one-day workshop on museum pest management. Sure I learned about pests in graduate school, but it’s been a while since I studied a bug under a microscope. And to top it off, I had my picture taken by Crista Pack of recent NYT fame.

Read the rest of this entry »